The thing with Guillemots is to expect the unexpected. The group’s biggest show yet started with the frontman Fyfe Dangerfield seated alone at an upright piano picking out the fragile melody of My Chosen One with quite the most gentle touch. An eerie hush descended upon the bustling students’ union. As the song died away, the rest of the band began making their way to the stage — through the audience — squawking and shaking and banging their instruments in a shrill cacophony that would have done Tom Waits proud.

Although they protest otherwise, Guillemots have made a feature out of their oddness, and have been rewarded with the sort of attention that most acts can only dream about. The group is of no fixed genre or continent: the classically trained Dangerfield comes from Birmingham; the jazz-schooled double-bass player Aristazabal Hawkes is Canadian; the guitarist MC Lord Magrao is from São Paulo, where he played in metal groups; and the drummer Greig Stewart, from the Scottish Highlands, used to play with the trad-folk band the Fureys.

With additional contributions from a two-man horn section, Guillemots performed music of uncompromising ingenuity but with an uncertain centre of gravity. Dangerfield was clearly the man with the vision thing. Dressed in hat and scarf, he looked like one of the chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins as he engaged in idiosyncratic banter with the audience. “Are you happy?” he asked. “Yes!” the crowd yelled. “I don’t believe you,” Dangerfield retorted as he led the band into We’re Here, a song that could have been an uptempo, easy-listening standard but for its vaguely existential lyric (“Our train stopped moving hours ago — we’re here”).

His voice, like the group’s music, was difficult to pin down: sometimes high and soulful, at others rather bland and nondescript. But his ability to engage the audience was never in doubt, especially when he sang the whole of Blue Would Still Be Blue without a microphone, accompanied only by the most delicate of sequences picked out note by note on a hand-held keyboard.

The band then kicked into São Paulo. Another clever, if longwinded song, it ended with the audience contributing a brief burst of percussion on hand-shakers distributed beforehand. With enough tricks up their sleeve to satisfy even the most jaded of musical palates, Guillemots have made a timely pitch for pop fame, but without achieving quite the musical greatness to which they have laid claim.

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