John Mayer is best known in the UK as a Heat magazine lothario who has squired a string of Hollywood A-listers including Jessica Simpson, Cameron Diaz and, most recently, Jennifer Aniston. His music, however, has largely fallen upon deaf ears, despite the fact that Mayer has picked up seven Grammy awards and sold 13m albums on the other side of the Atlantic.
His fourth album, Battle Studies, also topped the Billboard chart at the end of last year, and at this intimate acoustic gig it's easy to see why. He is the blues equivalent of Jon Bon Jovi – a slick, glossy distillation of a musical genre with all its rough edges scrubbed away.
Battle Studies is reportedly an album of reflections on Mayer's reputation as a ladies' man, and clunky love-is-war metaphors abound in this laid-back evening. Heartbreak Warfare chronicles a bitter break-up in the most mellow, FM-radio-friendly manner, while Half of My Heart (on record, a duet with Taylor Swift) is confessional blues-soul for the Hannah Montana generation.
Mayer's love for the blues is patently sincere, but simply doesn't translate to his antiseptic riffs. Thankfully, he is a sparky, engaging raconteur with a sense of comic timing honed during his sideline career as a standup: "You know, the furthest out I have ever been is a pot brownie," he says before launching into his amiable stoners' anthem, Who Says.
These between-song bon mots prove to be the most memorable element of a pleasant, unremarkable evening. "This is a song by another artist who doesn't do very well in the UK," Mayer drawls before a laconic strum through Tom Petty's Free Fallin', leaving you pondering why a man so naturally witty and sharp makes music so preternaturally bland.