The title of David Byrne’s most recent album and current tour is Who Is The Sky?. The phrase works two ways. Read literally, it has the playful 1960s feel of a Yoko Ono film or some absurdist Fluxus piece; firmly on brand, in other words, for someone as steeped as Byrne in New York’s downtown art lore. Read it aloud, however, and it becomes ‘Who Is This Guy?’, a more pointed title for an artist who has always seemed – to reference an old Talking Heads song – one of rock’s more slippery people.

At the second of two recent Glasgow dates, both interpretations seem to fit. In Talking Heads, Byrne was a jerky, remote presence, aloof to the point of alien. As his discursive solo career has evolved, he has gradually cut a more avuncular figure, and has lately taken to wearing dungarees and a guileless expression of wide-eyed wonder. Many of the defences of old seem to have been breached.

So, yes – who is this guy? On first appearance, a sweet, neat, silver-haired dude wearing a zingy orange uniform, delivering a Ted Talk with musical interludes. Shiny head mic clipped to his ear, Byrne shows us slides of the maternity hospital in which he was born – located just up the road in Dumbarton – and later gives a virtual tour of his NYC apartment (very nice, Dave, though that sofa needs upholstering). He tells us displays of ‘love and kindness are radical acts’ and ‘the most punk rock thing we can do right now’. As ‘T Shirt’ is performed, empowering slogans flash up on the wraparound video screen. A mood of childlike or, perhaps, faux-naif playfulness is rarely far from the surface.

Yet the art, and artifice, in all this is considerable. The extent to which Byrne is wearing optimism as a conceptual orange cloak can be debated, but this is a hi-tech, high-concept show from an artist who has never quite settled into doing the ordinary or obvious thing.

Singing and moving remarkably well for a 73-year-old, Byrne leads a 13-strong troupe – ‘band’ seems entirely the wrong word – of all-singing, all-dancing, all-playing talent. They are a wireless ensemble, fluid and malleable, unencumbered by cables or the usual scruffy scaffolding of a rock show as they slip-slide around the stage with and without instruments. Electric cello, violin, clarinet, synth and saxophone augment the more orthodox sounds, while the drum kit is ingeniously deconstructed, its component parts worn by three people in the manner of an ice-cream seller at the theatre. Like Byrne, they’re dressed top to toe in orange and wear head mics. They smile and strut and never miss a beat. It’s all lightly but brilliantly choreographed.

The really good news is that more than half the set consists of Talking Heads songs – from the stuttering ‘Psycho Killer’, through the fervent post-punk funk of ‘Slippery People’, ‘Houses In Motion’ and ‘Air’, to the band’s more orthodox but no less appealing later material such as ‘And She Was’ and ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’. Even when the quirky solo songs about a magical de-ageing cream and falling in love with your apartment threaten to stall the momentum, everything flows in the same direction.

I would advise doing whatever is necessary to catch David Byrne

This really isn’t the type of show that can be judged on a song-by-song basis. It is wholly concerned, rather, with the accretion of joy. The sweet groove of ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’ is the first song to have the place on its feet. By the frenetic finale, a glorious run-through of ‘Life During Wartime’, ‘Once in a Lifetime’ and ‘Burning Down the House’, dancing has become the default.

The concert Byrne played in 2018 at the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow, as part of the American Utopia tour, was one of the most inventive I have ever seen. Tonight’s visit turns out to be among the best I’ve attended since. Smart and heartfelt is a tough combination to pull off; you pay attention when someone keeps getting it right.

Byrne has two more London dates to play before this tour moves on, but he’ll be back in the summer for a handful of shows in larger venues. I would advise doing whatever is necessary to catch him.