Beth Jeans Houghton @ The Islington, London

Listening to other people’s dreams is usually as boring as listening to their stories about being on drugs. Unless the dreamer is Blazey Blazey – possibly not his real name – asking, to raucous laughter: “Have you ever had a dream you had a blowhole?” Because he did, when he had a cold, and then reached in to find it was full of snot.

Welcome to the glam-folk world of Beth Jeans Houghton and her Hooves of Destiny, where a Tigger-patterned ‘onesie’ is her costume on the hottest night of the month. (“I’m really soaking now,” she says, unsurprisingly, from under a woollen hat.) But whereas the kook factor has been there with Houghton for years, the songs and her warm, full-bodied voice have grown.

In a longer version of the lilting, dreamlike ‘Dodecahedrons’ than I’ve heard previously, Houghton and the rest of the band drop instruments entirely and repeat the chorus in close harmony. It’s a beautiful trick that they adapt elsewhere, along with the sort of sudden tempo changes employed by The Beach Boys on ‘Heroes and Villains’.

The setlist goes back as far as the lovelorn ‘Nightswimmer’, recorded with Adem from her debut single, up to the newish, risqué ‘Shampoo’ (chorus: “Looks like cum/Smells like flowers/I eat shampoo in the shower”.). They close in sharing mood by awarding a goody bag to the best dancer to a cover of ‘Like A Prayer’. From the winner’s reaction, I’d say she got the new single rather than a bottle of hair wash.