The warning bells begin tolling long before Martin Creed takes the stage. All you have to do is read the blurb accompanying the Turner prize-winning artist's gig to know that you are in for one of those nights. It claims that Creed "shows real musical commitment and talent that warrants serious attention outside the gallery context". Uh-oh. Someone is protesting too much.

In fact, it is difficult to protest enough about Creed's live performance. Backed by a female bassist and drummer, he plays jerky, deliberately unfunky white funk and two-chord jangles derived from the tentative post-punk of the Delta 5 and the Raincoats. It's a popular template at the moment, but Creed has a unique innovation.

This involves daringly replacing the sense of restless exploration that characterised the early 1980s indie scene with a sense of overweening smugness. Songs pass in which he listlessly counts from one to 50, or recites the alphabet in a Scots brogue. Another starts "I'm feeling blue", then runs through other colours Creed is feeling, including scarlet, maroon and puce. This is absolutely hilarious, because those colours do not have the same emotional and musical connotations as blue does. There is a song that endlessly repeats "What's the point?" and another that goes: "Fuck off, fuck off." These give rise to the notion that Creed has some kind of telepathic ability - because that's exactly what I was thinking.

This show is provocative only in that it seems less like a gig than an experiment to see how charmless and pleased with himself a man can appear before the audience storm the stage and physically attack him. In fact, the audience stay put, guffawing along and applauding to prove they are not the butt of Creed's lazy, witless jokes. It's a depressing evening that serves only to throw Creed's visual art into stark relief. Compared with this, watching lights going on and off for hours on end sounds like the night of your life.