Doves have quietly prospered while more eye-catching contemporaries have come and gone. Although not exactly “indie-bedwetters”, the trio from Manchester certainly saw the Coldplay era coming, and have brought a sensitive bloke-ish approach to the business of being a successful rock group while cultivating an old-fashioned image of the musician as honest artisan rather than rampant exhibitionist. Both their albums have been carefully crafted gems, and their debut, Lost Souls, was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize. But would musical worthiness alone be enough to guarantee a brilliant live show? On Tuesday in Glasgow, on the second night of their British tour, there were still technical difficulties to iron out. It took three attempts to get Catch the Sun started and, after a lengthy and troubled intro, an encore of Here it Comes was abandoned.

Earlier there was such a long delay before the guitarist Jez Williams was ready to play Last Broadcast that the add-on keyboard player Martin Rebelski resorted to entertaining the crowd with an impromptu version of Steptoe and Son.

Such foul-ups did allow the human side of the band to show through, however. The bearded singer Jimi Goodwin, who switched between bass and acoustic guitar, may not be the most charismatic performer but he did seem genuinely pleased to be there. “You have made this the best year of our lives,” he said, raising a glass of red wine to the predominantly male audience.

A sequence of back projections lent an extra visual dimension to the show, although images of flames (for Firesuite), New York (for N.Y.) and a spaceman (for Spaceface) were hardly the most challenging examples of illustrative symbolism at work.

In the end it all came down to the music, and here they were not found wanting. After opening with a pounding Pounding, they described an engaging variety of patterns without deviating from their indie, prog-rock flightpath, including the chiming, countryfied There Goes the Fear, the jazzy The Man who Told Everything, the neo-psychedelia of Words and rustic folk stylings of A House. On the home straight with a climactic Cedar Room, the crowd cheered them on all the way. Sometimes regular guys do finish first.

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