Performing a vanishingly rare UK arena show, the lovable funk group offered plenty of light-hearted musical delights for a bouyant O2 crowd, even in the absence of founding member Theo Katzman. Joey Dosik and Charles Jones were the standout soloists, whilst Jacob Jeffries’ juvenile skits were tedious for any concert-goer above the age of about seven.

Forget Sadiq Khan. For one night only, Joe Dart is the most powerful man in London. He strolls onto an empty stage at the O2 Arena, plays three notes on his bass guitar – rich, portentous, meaty – and pauses to allow a buoyant audience of thousands cheer back at him. Beneath his trademark shades, he exudes a statuesque cool. 100 minutes later he will look no different, again standing alone at centre stage as he rips into this evening’s climactic bass solo on Beastly, the bones in his fingers apparently becoming liquid as he accelerates into a chest-rattling final cadenza. In World Cup terms, it’s like we’re watching the Messi of bass guitar: unflappable, unhurried, and unfailingly brilliant in his chosen field.

Vulfpeck is arguably Joe Dart’s band, but the Michigan funk collective – my favourite band for most of my life, who hadn’t played in the UK since I discovered them in 2016 – are chock full of entertaining characters. Jack Stratton is the zany ringleader in a football shirt and Britney headset like an overenthusiastic PE teacher; Antwaun Stanley the old-school soul singer with ants in his pants; Joey Dosik the endearing basketball-obsessed lad next door; Cory Wong the pearly-toothed rhythm guitarist with never a hair out of place; Woody Goss the fabulously obtuse ornithologist and jazz piano nerd, chunky binoculars dangling from his neck even as he glides through another impeccable Rhodes solo. The big loss tonight is Theo Katzman, part kids entertainer, part spiritual guru, and a mainstay of Vulfpeck who has chosen to quit touring in the band in order to focus on his own (exceptional) singer-songwriter work.

It’s this marriage of these comedic characters with solid jazz know-how that makes Vulfpeck such an appealing prospect to so many. Here is a kids band that can rip through Jackson Five-esque Motown bangers, a joke act that also happens to include one of the world’s foremost bass guitar virtuosos. Concertgoers tonight age from seven to seventy. Stanley is central to that broad appeal, puppyishly bounding across the stage during an ecstatic 1612 and needing little excuse to orchestrate plenty of call-and-response with an audience all too willing to oblige. He finds some pathos amidst the relentless ad libs in a heart-melting Wait For the Moment, a song about not getting invited to a party that fittingly ends with a stunning extended solo from the introverted Goss, his improv questing from sleek baroque to angular jazz to barnstorming arena pop.

Vulfpeck are a motley crew of individuals, and songwriting quality in tonight’s set depends heavily on the songwriter. Stratton, perfect as an eccentric master of ceremonies, is a songwriter allergic to earnestness. 3 On E, his song about a generic funk bass line sounds, surprisingly enough, like a generic funk song, and tonight it comes with a pantomime routine where successive players refuse to end the song “until the groove is exhausted”. Indeed, exhausting is the word that comes to mind. This Is Not the Song I Wrote similarly tells the story of a terrible plagiarised pop song by reproducing just that, with no interest in altering the terrible bit; Jacob Jeffries’ autotuned chorus is an insult to the entire genre of pop music. Stratton does have great songs in him – Animal Spirits is a jubilant romp ably performed by Louis Cato, taking the unenviable task of replacing Katzman – but even here you have to accept that the lyrics are broadly meaningless (“Twitter on your telly / Ramen in your belly / Economics” reads the finale).

Perhaps it’s just as well that Stratton’s bandmates and co-songwriters are taking things more seriously, then. Tonight’s standout performer, Joey Dosik, delivers a stunning rendition of his lovelorn ballad Running Away, and his infectious funk bop LAX is perfectly pitched: a lighthearted song about being picked up from the airport that is both genuinely witty (“Bought you something back from a distant land / She bought fajitas from the taco stand”) and superbly catchy. Stanley and Jeffries are on hand as hilariously choreographed backing vocalists, and Dosik impressively makes a split-second switch from lead vocals to saxophone for a delightfully raspy finale. 

Imperious organist Charles Jones has a similarly impressive turn in the spotlight with his soulful gem Baby I Don’t Know Oh Oh, before a strikingly poignant organ rendition of gospel standard I Won’t Complain. It’s a world away from the work of Jacob Jeffries tonight, who offers a song called Mango Chutney that involves using his buttocks for percussion, and a performance of How Much Do You Love Me? that sounds like a mosquito buzzing around somewhere inside your inner ear canal. He precedes the former song with a skit about being too shy to play. “Perhaps this one should just stay in my living room,” he says, and you end up wishing he wasn’t joking.

On the face of it, Dean Town is an improbable closing number for any arena act: a pastiche of Weather Report’s Teen Town that comprises a complex 16-bar through-composed bass melody and no real hooks to speak of. For some reason, though, it’s a universal fan favourite. Perhaps it’s something in Dart’s flawless bass playing, or Stratton’s insistent disco drumming, or the synchronicity of Goss and Wong, who also play the bass line in lock-step unison. Whatever the reason, the O2 sings every note of that sinuous, restless jazz fusion melody, and the crowd continues to bellow the opening four notes as they stream out towards North Greenwich station ten minutes later. It’s nonsensical, it’s silly, it’s oddly euphoric. It’s Vulfpeck.