Henry Rollins has spent 20 years honing a spoken-word career alongside his day job as a US punk icon, and he has got a lot better at it. Where once his earnest, stream-of-consciousness rants could appear self-indulgent and interminable, Rollins has now developed into a skilled anecdotalist with the timing and finesse of a natural comedian.

He remains a mass of contradictions, a tattooed bodybuilder with the impeccable liberal politics of a New York Times leader writer. Yet his defining feature remains the restless mind that leads this driven soul into a succession of unlikely adventures around the globe that he then rehashes on stage at breakneck pace. Rollins' latest fixation is travelling alone to the world's most perilous trouble spots to see what happens, leading to a series of bizarre encounters in the souks of Damascus and tearooms of Tehran. He is laugh-out-loud funny describing getting caught up in protesting crowds in Islamabad on the day of Benazir Bhutto's assassination and, keen to observe but anxious to avoid giving offence, somehow impaling himself on a barbed wire fence inside a mosque as the city burns around him.

He moves easily between the portentous and the preposterous, conveying the bug-eyed helplessness of a right-thinking American watching the chaos in Iraq unfold. He is equally funny describing becoming a tongue-tied, middle-aged punk anorak on meeting David Lee Roth or the Ruts. After a long career as a firebrand musical fundamentalist, Henry Rollins is sounding remarkably like a voice of reason.

· At Academy 1, Manchester, tomorrow. Box office: 0161-832 1111. Then touring.