"The truth is I have always been a folk artist," says Julian Cope, leering from beneath his aviator shades and pilot's hat as his lank hair swishes around his bare midriff. "But in my case, there is an umlaut on the o."

Roots metal? Why not? The maverick Cope has flown the freak flag so resolutely that he long ago became his own musical category. After 30 years, this cult rocker appears to have morphed into a singular amalgam of Jim Morrison, Noam Chomsky and Eddie Izzard.

Tonight's bizarre show sees him pull only three songs from his psychedelically brooding new album, Dark Orgasm, a vitriolic broadside against organised religion and patriarchal culture. The record is frequently stunning, yet Cope largely eschews it in favour of a stop-start jaunt through his back catalogue mixed with rambling surrealist interludes.

He's best when he's heaviest. The new, anti-fundamentalist Islam She's Gotta Ring on Her Finger (and Another One Through Her Nose) is colossal Stooges-style sludge rock powered by guitarist Dogan, once of fellow stoner philosophers Spiritualised. So how does Cope follow it? By declaring he is writing "a rock opera called A Dick in the Afterlife".

The set is equally erratic. The Hawkwind-style cosmic freakout Highway to the Sun elides into the beatnik slapstick of 1984's King of Chaos, and when Cope goes solo to revisit the fragile acid-pop whimsy of his alma mater band, the Teardrop Explodes, the pace notably flags.

Then Dogan roars back with the Zeppelin riffs of new track Zoroaster and Cope climbs his mic stand to gurn at his adoring acolytes. One of rock's last true renegades has proved, yet again, that there's nowt as queer as fölk.

· At Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, tomorrow. Then touring.
· Box office: 0191-233 0444