Julian Cope has been a pop star, an antiquary and a novelist, but this two-hour set finds him in the favoured role of psychedelic raconteur. With his wild hair, wilder beard, military cap and leather jacket making him look like an acid-fried biker, highlights from his long music career intersperse with entertaining gags and yarns. He explains that he can happily strum his old Teardrop Explodes songs, such as The Culture Bunker “now that Kate Bush has reformed”. He recalls psychedelic epiphany arriving in Liverpool city centre in 1980, when a £2 LSD tab got him “out of my mind for 16 hours”. After subsequently quitting drinking for 21 years, he has returned to the sauce after a strange encounter in an Armenian cave: “Seven mulberry vodkas later, I was back!”

He’d make a decent stand-up, but behind the shades and self-styled “Arch Drude” persona lurks a great British pop tunesmith. Delivered with just a guitar and his (surprisingly unravaged) voice, new songs and old classics such as Sunspots, Treason and The Greatness and Perfection of Love demonstrate his enduring gift for melody. Perhaps had Cope not taken so much acid, or posed naked except for a turtle shell on the cover of the Fried album, he wouldn’t have alienated so many record companies or bade a seemingly permanent farewell to the charts.

Still, he seems happy enough in his unique niche, bashing out tunes that marry personal concerns (the environmental cost of motoring; substance use among ancient civilisations) with eyebrow-raising titles (Autogeddon Blues; They Were All on Hard Drugs; Out of My Mind on Dope and Speed). He is particularly proud of his latest state-of-the-world address, which has a melody “so sweet Brotherhood of Man would reject it” and a “Christmas ending”. It’s called Cunts Can Fuck Off.