After the multi-media extravaganza of Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (the show that Laurie Anderson brought to London's Barbican in May last year), her appearance on Friday went back to basics. Every-thing has been pared down: there was no over-arching theme, no elaborate visuals, just the singer, a backing band of three musicians - percussion, keyboards and bass guitar - and a sequence of songs that ranged right across her 20-year career.

There was little hint of Anderson the performance artist, very few appearances of her own invented electronic instruments (even the trademark violin was only used occasionally) and much more that was delivered penny-plain over the familiar ambient backdrop.

The impulse for her current tour is a new album, Life On a String, her first collection of new material to be released for seven years, and songs from that were interleaved with old favourites. But it turned out to be a distinctly low-key affair - a continuous 100-minute set interspersed with the usual Anderson anecdotes - that only really caught fire in a few intermittent numbers.

Even O Superman, her one breakthrough into the charts and now nearly 20 years old, seemed a bit subfusc this time around.

The latest songs are a mixed bag. Some seem to have been developed from her work on Moby Dick - one of the best, Pieces and Parts, is an allegory built around the skeleton of a whale. But others are less distinctive, and alongside some of her finest achievements, like the bleak Hansel and Gretel, they seem distinctly pallid.

For an artist whose work has always been grounded in US culture, especially the topography of New York, some reference to the recent atrocities was inevitable. But there was something slightly self-conscious about the dedication of the concert to the "opportunities" provided by the attack; no one could have mistaken Anderson's sincerity, just her way of showing it.

Perhaps in these times there is only so much gentle irony that one can take at a single sitting.