Alphabet Backwards is a band that take up one of the British pop music’s most popular and chameleonic mantles, that of radio-friendly, hummable songs with a touch of social commentary, seeking to find beauty, poetry and solace in the banality and traditions of life in the UK. You can trace this particular brand of hit-making back as far as the Kinks through Squeeze and more recently, The Streets and Arctic Monkeys. Local troupe Alphabet Backwards aren’t in the same league as any of these acts yet, but there are a few promising signs that they might be capable of something very good indeed.

Much of the band’s set is straightforward, mid-afternoon at V Festival, rudimentary indie pop. Nothing offensive, not striking either, the songs are fine with all their figurative Is dotted and Ts crossed.

Forthcoming single Polar Bears is perhaps the best distillation of this; it has cooing doowop vocals, a wonky casio keyboard refrain and a nicely catchy chorus. You wouldn’t turn it off on the car radio, but you wouldn’t rush home and look it up immediately either.

The same goes for most of their other tracks too, Primark, Eighties Pop Video and Ambulance all follow the same formula, pleasant strumming and a hook that could quite easily be whistled by every person in the venue. Then, about two thirds of the way through their 50 minutes, things get interesting. This is because the band debut some material and the chatter that had been a constant in the back of the venue stops. Though musically it’s not a huge leap from the rest of the set, the thesaurus-flicking and slightly forced lyrical quirkiness is gone and a vulnerability comes in, which seems, certainly at first listen, strangely profound. If this is a transition the band persevere with, then they could be worth getting very excited about.