A couple of weeks ago, a teenaged Radio 1 listener was asked her opinion of Satellite of Love, Lou Reed's first Top 10 single since 1973. Despite its snappy house remix, she witheringly dismissed it as the kind of thing her parents would like. So there we are: the erstwhile emperor of sleaze, reduced to a purveyor of entertainment to the aged. Could it get any more tragic?

It certainly could, but Reed is no more inclined to play poignant old coot than he is to take requests from the house. The occasional smirk brightens his marble features, but he allows no familiarity from a crowd dying to show its love. As he ignores pleas for Sweet Jane and other Reedian toe-tappers, one desperate character wails: "Sausages!" Instead, he pieces together a show based on the cobwebbiest corners of his post-Velvet Underground career: obscurities from the albums Ecstasy, The Raven and Magic and Loss.

Heavily reliant on an athletic cellist introduced only as Jane, Reed - dressed in black, naturally, and looking freakishly younger than his 61 years - uses her dissonant sawing as a backdrop to what sounds more like beatnik poetry than pop music. It's powerful stuff, Reed enunciating every wracked syllable in a voice that has become oakenly resonant with age. It's not to everyone's taste, but there's more enthusiasm for the Dylanish melancholia of Guardian Angel and The Day John Kennedy Died. The reward is an abstract, almost classical, Venus in Furs and a contractual-obligation trot through Satellite, Perfect Day and Walk on the Wild Side.

He sounds unutterably weary during the last, nearly dying of ennui as he recounts the antics of Candy Darling. In which case, how does this pensioner still manage to be so cool that the standing ovation goes on long after he's left the stage?