The start of Seth Lakeman's show was not what you would expect from a performer with a traditional folk music background. As the lights darkened and an ominous peal of thunder rumbled from the PA, it was more like the beginning of the first Black Sabbath album than the prelude to an evening of acoustic music. And even when Lakeman began singing The Storm - a cautionary tale about a ship's captain lost overboard in heavy seas in Plymouth Sound - there was still something heavy and foreboding about the sound. Yet the 31-year-old singer was armed with nothing more threatening than an acoustic guitar, which he exchanged for a fiddle for the next number, The Hurlers, a lively jig set to a galloping floor-tom beat.

Accompanied by his brother Sean on acoustic guitar, Ben Nicholls on double bass and Andy Tween on drums, Lakeman put on a show that would have been as acceptable at the Reading Festival as it would at the Cambridge Folk Festival - no mean feat. The trouble is that the sort of bands who can pull off that kind of trick - the Levellers, the Saw Doctors, Flogging Molly, perhaps - tend to be regarded with suspicion by folk purists and mainstream rock populists alike.

Lakeman, who was shortlisted for the 2005 Mercury Music Prize for Kitty Jay, an album recorded for £300 in the kitchen of his brother's cottage in Devon, is clearly operating on a bigger budget these days. But while his latest album, Poor Man's Heaven, was a Top Ten hit this year, it has steered him away from such rarefied heights of critical approval.

With his rugged, Heathcliffian looks and a voice to match, Lakeman clearly has his eyes on bigger prizes. It was impressive to see how he converted the traditional imagery and instrumentation of songs such as The Riflemen of War, Blood Red Sky and Solomon Brown into songs with an urgent, modern resonance.

But it was still the old numbers that elicited the most raucous response, notably Blood upon Copper and Kitty Jay, both of which featured Lakeman in trad fiddler mode and brought out the best in his playing.

Loughborough University, tomorrow; Opera House, Bournemouth, Wed

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