In her days with Fairground Attraction, Eddi Reader was the epitome of squeaky-clean. The band's ubiquitous song Perfect was a favourite of housewives and advertising executives, a fact that never did quite sit with Reader's past in a rough district of Glasgow and as backing vocalist with left-wing guitar firebrands the Gang of Four. These days, though, she seems a much more relaxed, even racy character. "I've just been wandering around wee Leeds," she tells us. "I slipped into the adult sex shop."

If Reader has been corrupted, it is because she has become obsessed with a rakish sexual predator who "fancied himself, fancied women . . . and wrote great songs". His name was Robert Burns, and the great romantic poet exerts a powerful pull over this "hardly educated, council estate overspill girl".

If Burns hadn't passed away in 1796, perhaps Reader would have joined the queue of women who - she tells us with relish - laid down before his genius. Instead, she is promoting the album Eddi Reader Sings the Songs of Robert Burns, and, with a cracking band, makes centuries-old songs sound relevant. She introduces My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose by explaining how he wrote it for "a number of ladies - it's much better than 'Give us yer number, hen'". More powerfully, she talks of reassuring her young son during the Iraq crisis, before launching into the stunning lines from Ye Jacobites about haunting "a parent's life with bloody war".

Reader is consumed by these songs, singing gloriously with closed eyes. When she tells how a couple of spiritualists came up to her after one gig to tell her they had seen ghosts dancing behind her, it's hardly surprising. But her wit - "Don't you dare shout, 'He's behind you!'" - offsets any pretension.

Curiously, she is less enthralled by her own songs. Patience of Angels shimmers nicely, but Perfect is reinvented as an Elvis-type rocker. Gradually, things go slightly awry, with singalongs and her main guitarist, Boo Hewerdine, taking the mic. The main problem is that, at two hours, this show starts to get exhausting. She should take some tips from Burns, who died at 37 and, by reputation, never lingered anywhere for too long.

· At Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, tonight. Box office: 0151-709 3789. Then touring.