To look at the quartet of off-duty plumbers who comprise Liverpool's Shack - which you can't do on their current album, HMS Fable, as it fails to include a photo - you'd never guess that they harbour what the New Music Express contends is "our greatest songwriter".

This exaggerates singer/ guitarist Mick Head's place in the pantheon of wistful balladeers, but his is still a classic rock tale. Tipped as a next big thing since 1987, he and guitarist brother John frittered away most of the last decade on drugs and only resurfaced this year, with the incongruously pretty HMS Fable.

Glowing reviews of its world-weary guitar-pop coupled with the rarity of live appearances stuffed the Empire with what seemed like everyone in west London, plus Noel Gallagher. I'd hazard a guess his thoughts ran along the lines: "He's not as pretty as our kid, but why can't I write songs that unsentimentally juxtapose tenderness and toughness like that?"

Gallagher can comfort himself, though, with the fact that Shack is not called Shack for nothing - the band has the charisma of a shed. Mick Head reportedly claims 19th-century rock dudes Coleridge and Byron as influences, but their wild romanticism is nowhere apparent in his approach to stage craft, which consists of a series of workmanlike encounters with the microphone. Although gifted with an evocatively woebegone tenor and the Liverpudlian faculty for harmony, he's stuck in an 80s rut in which just dragging yourself on stage is supposedly ample entertainment.

Sometimes it can be, but not when your songs are so delicate that the nuances and hidden corners are lost somewhere between stage and 10th row. Some music is meant to be experienced in closer quarters, and theirs especially demands intimacy to appreciate Head's colloquial songwriting, which is informed by his upbringing on the rough Kensington estate.

But if they have to play the big places, they could take steps to personalise things. Head could drop his habit of appending every number with a cheery "Nice one!" and adopt, say, an Iggy-ish stance of dark danger. They could fill the set with more songs like Pull Together, with its keening beauty. And next time, an okay gig could be transformed into a memorable one.