This reminds me of a small pub back home. Every night, from ten or eleven, the stuffy dark wood room fills with smoke and conversation, until a band steps onto the tiny stage. Then guitars, drums and strong voices collide and merge. Beer bottles and silent TVs are overpowered by sound. People lean against counters and step on toes until the space before the stage is a mass of nodding, swaying bodies, shaken apart only by a drunken dancer or two as the night deepens.

The very same peculiar sensation pulses here. It's an hour before midnight on Friday, and the Queen's Head is yellow lamps above dark booths, couples on barstools, high heels, beer. Drums crash inside my shoes, and guitar strings vibrate in my neck. It feels as though sound is scooping out your body to fill it with uplifting twangs and claps. Among loops of cables on stage, five musicians tap their feet and nod in closed-eyed devotion. Mellow tunes, mostly, though some songs begin with great urgency as all instruments plunge in frenetically.

Scott Albert Johnson creates an atmosphere of simplicity. Frowning in concentration, he makes music easy to access and appreciate, even though it is my very first time listening to him. The songs feel down to earth as country does, frankly energetic and happy with their own existence. Whoops of delight and claps sound from shadowy corners of the pub as he ends a song and begins another, taking a moment in between to talk to someone in the audience.

From my booth, I listen to Johnson and watch silhouettes framed in colour. I can tell they are laughing as they sway across the wooden floor. An hour ago the floor was empty, but now couples swing and turn, grinning at their clumsy aspirations to elegance. Johnson cups a harmonica to his mouth, and its thick note swoops in with curlicues that glide across quiet heads tilted in attention to his song.