Many things can be proven to have a harmful effect on an artist's career - drug addiction, an unsuitable wife's advice, the endorsement of Noel Gallagher - but nothing has quite the detrimental power of the words "new Dylan" when applied to a nascent singer-songwriter. For all their good intentions, critics who deploy the phrase might as well spend their time sticking needles into said singer-songwriter's wax effigy, as the likes of Barry McGuire, Jesse Westchester and Steve Forbert would doubtless attest - if anybody knew where they were now to ask them.
For the man currently labouring under rock's own Gypsy curse, Willy Mason looks surprisingly chipper. But then you might look chipper if you were facing tonight's audience. When not singing along, they carry on like eager middle-managers at the boss's dinner party. Everything Mason says is greeted with howls of appreciative laughter. When he drops his fingerpick, he says: "I've dropped my fingerpick." You would think Peter Cook and Oscar Wilde had just wandered on stage and begun trading bon mots. Meanwhile, girls in the crowd seem intent on engaging Mason in increasingly flirtatious conversation. By the end of the set, they're practically climbing into his lap and purring.
The distaff reaction may be down to Mason's tousled appearance, but even if you're not reduced to hysterics by his every utterance, you can see why the rest of the audience think they're on to something special. He starts shakily and out of tune, but by the time he performs Waiter in the Station, written by his mother, the appeal becomes evident: a voice that can switch deftly from plaintive croon to something more earthy, oddly heart-warming tunes, and, it has to be said, a Dylan-ish turn of phrase.
Tonight's gig feels rather like gate-crashing a private party, but as Mason decorates Sold My Soul with some convincingly wracked blues wailing, the suspicion arises that, curse permitting, it won't stay private for much longer.
· At the Barfly Club, Cardiff (0870 907 0999), tomorrow. Then touring.
