If Paisley’s Paolo Nutini is a rock star – and he certainly seems to be, as his Caustic Love album was 2014’s fourth-biggest seller, and his arena tour is sold out – then he’s not having any of it. His primary attribute, apart from his scuffed-up white-soul rasp, is a good-eggness that has him starting 25 minutes late in order to accommodate fans delayed by tube problems. His reward is a particularly lusty collective shriek when he eventually slouches on stage, party-casual in black T-shirt, jeans and aerated hair. Your average showboater would lap up the love; Nutini just waves and settles into Scream (Funk My Life Up), a Caledonian cousin of Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk.

He’s hard to read. Give him a torch song such as Diana – all sultry blue notes and low lighting – and he’s deeply affecting, dipping languidly into the 1960s southern soul reservoir. Give him an upbeat number like Pencil Full of Lead – stripped of its New Orleans-jazz syncopation and endowed with a rock roar – and he musters a flinty, Springsteenesque bark. Give him, for that matter, one of his biggest hits, Jenny Don’t Be Hasty, and he reimagines it as murky acid-rock that swallows up his woozy vocal.

There’s clearly bountiful talent there, and he’s loaded the set list with the feline slowies that suit him best: an hour of that, and you’re ready to follow wherever he leads. But there’s also an impenetrable top layer that makes it hard to work out what he’s like – wracked Van Morrisonish soulman or happy chappie with an especially emollient voice? Who knows? Moreover, while you don’t want to accuse him of teasing his mainly female crowd, he knows what strings to pull: the glitter ball that appears at the end of One Day is greeted with swoony squeals, and announcing that Looking for Something is “a song for my mother” has a predictably hormonal effect. Perhaps it’s better to enjoy him without asking too many questions.