Thirty-five years ago, she was the most hated woman in music. Today, after five decades of doggedly pursuing her singular vision through critical brickbats and derision, Yoko Ono has become a respected survivor. The former Mrs Lennon is now officially a national treasure.

This compulsive, envelope-pushing performance artist is a fitting addition to Patti Smith's Meltdown bill. Any thoughts that she might have mellowed with her 72 years are banished by her entrance: slipping through the backdrop as birdsong trills, Ono trots onto the stage with a black plastic bag over her head.

So what is the point of Yoko Ono? Detractors have often dismissed her as an avant-garde charlatan, but tonight she cuts an intense and mercurial figure. Backed by a five-piece band, with son Sean the ghostly spit of his late father on bass, she fires straight into I Want You to Remember Me, a misogynistic monologue recited over appropriately dysfunctional freeform jazz.

The music is a post-modern melange of stylistic appropriations, with Ono's caterwauling vocal often lost amid atonal white noise or skittish blues. The crypto-feminist Rising sees her seemingly stricken by St Vitus's Dance, yet her brittle gyrations emphasise the power of her trademark cathartic banshee howls and yelps.

The set is drawn mainly from 2001's Blueprint for a Sunrise, an album from which Mr Tune was largely absent, and a few of the No Wave white noise wig-outs are more fun to make than to listen to. Yet the yearning Will I is kookily engaging, Ono scratching an existential itch from the midst of a gnomic, distracted reverie.

The defiantly uncompromising mood is lifted only for the encore, when the smirking Pet Shop Boys join her to ladle their clattering electro-rhythms over the fragile Walking on Thin Ice: a suitably incongruous climax to a contrary and reliably perplexing evening.