Context is everything. The real Marquee, in Charing Cross Road, was a place fecund with rock history. It's now a pub. The new Marquee is in the bowels of a spanking new shopping centre in Islington. The vibes, to paraphrase Barry Adamson, ain't nothin' but terrible.

The music is savage, evocative, funny, profoundly sexual and deeply suave; Adamson displays more wit in the course of an evening than many artists manage in their entire careers. But he might as well be singing in the Starbucks upstairs. Still, it's a bravura performance, and new album The King of Nothing Hill, from which much of tonight's set comes, is as delicious a conflation of the silver screen and the long dark night of the soul as any of the consistently good records he's made over the past decade.

Before "cinematic" became a byword for overblown or "contains John Barry samples", before everyone with a computer and a couple of car boot sale easy listening albums was making "soundtracks for invisible films", Adamson (formerly the bass-player in post punk art-rock anomaly Magazine) was reinventing the film noir lexicon from the perspective of a black Mancunian and combining filmic ambience with funk.

Tonight, slinking snake-hipped across the stage, he's the spit of Isaac Hayes but has the noble air of a tragedian and the chops of a conman: part Faust, part Mephistopheles. That might sound grand, but Whispering Streets, with a chorus worthy of the Walker Brothers, is amongst the grandest, most passionate pop music that is currently falling on the deaf ears of radio programmers.

Conversely, the epic Le Matin Des Noire is a caustic jazz dystopia: Adamson offers up a frenzied, frantic trumpet solo. Current single Black Amour is Barry White discovering irony but The Monkey Speaks His Mind, from previous album As Above So Below (his fourth, but the first on which he sang), is a frightening tumult of sexual dysfunction.

Worlds collide and ambiguities seethe in these songs. But in Islington, no one can hear you scream.