IT is always a delight to see Beth Orton out and about, but it is not clear why she is playing a cluster of low-key dates this spring.

Now 40, she last released an album in 2006: Comfort Of Strangers, the one Orton CD available to buy on Wednesday night’s merchandise stand.

Settling on a stool with acoustic guitar and an array of cups and bottled water, she opened with Someone’s Daughter, She Cries Your Name and Touch Me With Your Love, three peaks from her 1996 debut, the trail-blazing folktronica classic Trailer Park.

“This is an old one,” she would say later. “Well, they’re all old ones really.” Indeed, nearly all 16 were, and so glimpses were all too rare of what may lie in store on the album she is apparently “preparing” for Anti-Records, the American label she joined last July.

Not that she mentioned it on Wednesday night when Candles lit up the Pocklington night with fresh promise of melancholia to come – and there may or may not have been another new song, but it passed by without introduction.

Heavily pregnant and tenderly saying “Love you, Nance” in response to her young daughter’s “bye, mummy” as Nancy left the sound-box for bedfordshire part way through, Beth was more relaxed than in days gone by. So maybe that is why she is back on the road, for the joy of it, playing “for the Pocklingtons”.

Long gone was the folktronica queen. This was solo Beth, folk Beth, acoustic Beth, with a persistent dry cough lending her voice an extra cracked timbre, and a back catalogue given the casual, carefree and close-up treatment.

American support act Sam Amidon joined her for a while, adding harmony to Shopping Trolley, Concrete Jungle and, most pleasingly, an Alex Chilton cover.

Hearing that siren voice again, the desire for Orton’s full-scale return grows anew, but baby number two just might keep us waiting.

How apt she should finish with Ooh Child.