Barry Adamson, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Immediately before Barry Adamson started his performance, the audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall was treated to a few fragrant verses about arts cinemas and the homeless from Yorkshire poet Geoffrey Allerton. The keen-eyed soon twigged that Allerton was actually a fictional construct, part-Simon Armitage, part-Freddie Trueman, created by comedian Simon Day. A beautifully idiosyncratic prelude to a pretty idiosyncratic headline set.

When Barry Adamson stalked on stage, posing at the top of a short staircase on a white Austin Powers shagpile, it would have been easy to mistake him for another comic invention. Sporting a feathery hat, gold necklace, beard and shades, the black-clad bassist looked like a hep cat archetype inspired by countless Sixties hipster films. I suspect he was in on the joke though. For a bona fide pop Zelig who made his name playing with gloomy existentialists Magazine and later with Nick Cave at his bleakest, he also turned out to have some rather funny lines up his sleeve.

Someone shouted for the guitar to be turned up. Actually everything needed to be turned upProceedings started off slightly nervily and restrained, with Adamson singing sans bass. "Destination" nodded to his Mancunian roots with an added Joy Division reference, the "Transmission" mantra "dance, dance, dance to the radio". After a couple of numbers, someone shouted for the guitar to be turned up. Actually everything needed to be turned up. Slowly the polite show found its teeth. The bulk of the 90-minute set came from the new album, I Will Set You Free, but there were numerous welcome back-catalogue forays too. The decade-old "Whispering Streets" had a John Barry vibe, while "Psycho-Sexual" was all brooding beatnik jive talk.

The gig certainly jumped around stylistically, in keeping with the 53-year-old wingman-turned-frontman's solo career, which mixes the filmic – Adamson has done soundtrack work for David Lynch and recently for Carol Morley's Dreams of a Life – with the funky and the poppy. The current single, "Turnaround" – "it's free, like everything these days" reflected its composer – had such a classic glacial feel it could have almost been an offcut from an early Magazine long-player.