As ever, Sinéad O'Connor cuts an incongruous, contradictory figure. Now 41, from the neck up she still looks like a pretty, 16-year-old boy. From the neck down, in grey man's suit, man's shirt and Dr Martens, shuffling and with what appears to be something of a potbelly, she looks, as my companion points out with a mixture of horror and affection, like Shaun Ryder. At one point, while waiting for a guitar to be tuned, she tells a lewd - albeit funny - joke with child-like glee. Soon after, she is expressing somewhat disingenuous indignation that Christian radio in the US, where she has been doing a lot of promotion for her new album Theology, find her difficult to deal with. Her stage presence is frustratingly muted - frequently, she seems not quite present - but sparks on occasion with tantalising glimpses of fire.
It says a lot that two decades since her one consistently brilliant album, The Lion and the Cobra, and not much less since her last significant hit, she can still pull a sizeable crowd of fervent devotees. Despite her deathless ability to make wincingly awful aesthetic choices, the reining in of the once gloriously wild extremity of her voice and the infinite indulgence she demands of her audience, she retains the aura of a pop star, even if she couldn't have made herself more of an outsider.
Apparently now at peace with her past, she plays songs from every point of her bizarre career. Appropriately, Never Get Old, written when she was 15, remains extraordinary: alien and bewitching. Then, two-thirds of the way through, the band crash in over her heady, muezzin wail. They conjure a slick, heavy plod that suffocates O'Connor's voice. Still, there is a voyeuristic, skin-pricking thrill in hearing brutally explicit songs such as The Last Day of Our Acquaintance pick over the failure of her marriage to first husband John Reynolds as he sits behind the drum-kit, offering the occasional, awkward half-smile. The new songs are similarly weighed down by dully unambitious settings. Only If You Had a Vineyard - a setting of a tract from Isaiah - makes magic with its pretty ponderousness.
It is best to gloss over the excursions into cod reggae, the clumsy homilies and the staggering averageness of the musicians this exceptional talent chooses to work with. In an industry that still treats female musicians appallingly, Sinéad O'Connor has survived as a beacon of iconoclastic, if often self-defeating, self-will.
