THE ticket promised an evening of Beck playing “solo and acoustic”, and apart from the bits where Beck played an electric guitar, or a Wurlitzer keyboard or fooled around with a drum machine, that was precisely what we got. No support act, no backing band, no props or visual distractions of any sort, and for most of the performance, little more than a puddle of coloured light to relieve the gloom. For a man whose previous shows have been a riot of theatrical invention and garish technical wizardry it was certainly a radical reinvention. But as a musical entertainment it was actually rather boring.

He took the stage, soberly dressed in dark trousers and jacket, and began with Guess I’m Doing Fine, a typically maudlin track from his current album, Sea Change. Perched on a high-backed stool, his music and manner were that of a barfly with a sad story to tell as he strapped on a harmonica rack and embarked on a faithfully old-school version of the Hank Williams song Lonesome Whistle. His rich, deep voice and finger-picking guitar playing were certainly up to the task. But as he rolled out a succession of his own songs in a similarly bleak, downbeat vein — Already Dead, Dead Melodies, The Golden Age — there was something mechanical and disengaged about his performance.

Whereas in previous incarnations, Beck has proved a consummate showman, here he seemed to have mistaken earnestness for sincerity. Even a version of the Flaming Lips song Do You Realize? seemed to lose its innocent zest and sounded strangely lifeless and plodding in his hands.

The mood lightened as the drum machine was pressed into use to provide a stiff samba beat for Tropicalia and then he plonked out a couple of tunes on an upright piano which had cost him $2,000 to have freighted over from America. From the sound of it, he could have borrowed a similar instrument, at substantially less cost, from any South London pub backroom.

He complained about the delta blues that he had loved as a boy being hijacked by the makers of beer commercials, but couldn’t be bothered to play more than a tantalising few bars of it himself on a National Steel guitar. And then finally, with the beatbox in full effect, he played an idiosyncratic version of Loser, the “slacker anthem” that put him on the map ten years ago and which almost retrieved the show for him on Saturday night. A taut, harmonica blues, One Foot in the Grave, gave a further glimpse of what might have been achieved if Beck had allowed himself to wander a little further from his own tightly ordered brief as a lovelorn, alt.country romantic.