Caught Live: Herman Dune @ Union Chapel, London

There's something a bit illicit about attending a gig in a church; something slightly subversive about watching a bunch of guys with guitars play in front of a pulpit - especially when there's a strong chance the majority of the audience don't ordinarily set foot on such consecrated grounds. The guys with guitars tonight are Herman Dune, a veteran indie outfit whose entire ten-album career has, I must confess (we are in church after all!), entirely passed your writer by up to this point.

When the band first appear, I'm not entirely sure what to make of their dress code: wearing jaunty hats, braces and too-short jeans with patterned socks and funky shoes, band leader David-Ivar Herman Düne in particular looks not altogether unlike an alpine yodeller. His soft-spoken onstage demeanour quickly gives way, however, to witty and well-crafted songs that utterly captivate. My original plan having been to grab my allotted first-three-songs' worth of photos before making a discreet exit, I soon find that Herman Dune are SO damn good I simply can't bring myself to leave. The power of their storytelling is such that it transports you to another place: listening to it, you're no longer sitting in a church in Islington; rather, you're at a café, you're walking down the street, you're a spy in Hungary, you're driving on a summery evening, you're having an argument with your partner...

Almost all of their songs have a strange happy/sad ambiguity that still manages to leave the listener smiling. The poppy undertones and joyous choruses on tracks like 'Be A Doll and Take My Heart' (from June's well-received Strange Moosic LP) have me, for one, grinning like an idiot in the front pew. Even the sheer indie tweeness of 'Lay Your Head on My Chest' proves a delight - who, after all, can really resist lines like "You should never go swimming with a heavy heart..."; or the country-tinged chorus underpinning 'In The Long Long Run'; or the fact that they use nursery-school rhyming ("actor" with "tractor", for instance) on what is an otherwise fairly melancholy tune?

Tonight's set draws heavily from that aforementioned summer release, and before the band perform the title track the congregation are asked to join in on the refrain of "Ah Hears Strange Moosic". Halfway through the song it starts to feel like some kind of religious experience, the soft chanting filling the church, the faces of the audience transfixed. At the end of what's been a wholly enrapturing set, they're deservedly given ecstatic applause, a standing ovation and an encore - a real one, as opposed to one of those fake, 'we know we're coming back out in a second' ones that just about everyone seems to go in for nowadays.

Having walked in a non-believer, I shuffle back out into the chilly London night with the feeling of having been well and truly converted to the church of Herman Dune.

As well as penning her unholy thoughts on the gig for us, Anni also took some sacrilegious photos of both Herman Dune and opening act Sean Flinn & The Royal We. Go here to view a gallery of her shots.