Two evenings of cultural happenings curated by a popular music icon — there have been precedents for this sort of thing, most notably the Meltdown seasons on the South Bank, but given the recent events of his life, “Pete Doherty’s Meltdown” might have sent out unfortunate signals. Far better the pipe-and-slippers connotations of An Evening With Peter Doherty. Apart from anything else, it was a billing that assured he would be there — not always a foregone conclusion when it comes to the erratic Babyshambles frontman.

In fact, Doherty was conspicuously active throughout last night’s show — for reasons that would later become clear. Beyond his new corporate paymasters at EMI, it remains unclear who Peter’s Friends are these days. As it turns out, one of them is “an old man from the 60s”. That, at any rate, was how folk guitar legend Bert Jansch introduced himself. Picking through the beatnik blues of It Don’t Bother Me, the song’s devil-may-care sentiments seemed suited to the host of the evening, who sauntered on in a translucent top looking like a bony nicotine-stained index finger in a trilby.

Of all the Jansch songs that they might have duetted on, you wouldn’t have bet on Needle Of Death, Jansch’s grisly paean to the drugs with which Doherty has become synonymous. But as Jansch played, Doherty turned it into an oddly beautiful love song.

That’s easier said than done, and by way of evidence, Doherty’s brother in headgear, Alan Wass, bellowed a parodically dumb exultation to the romance of Class A drugs.

Doherty can be a distant presence at times, a quality that you suspect will for ever bring out a mothering tendency in many of the well-scrubbed females who watched last night — among them Kate Moss, to whom he dedicated What Katie Did Next, referring to her as his fiancée. The tabloid machine instantly went into overdrive; his cult grows even faster in inverse proportion to his output. The rumbustious All The Time is one of only five new songs that he has released in the past 18 months, but it was greeted with a cheer that magnified when a rapper friend by the name of Hunt delivered a scattergun soliloquy over it. There are times when it has been all too easy to forget what it was that Doherty was famous for in the first place. But, coming on like a broken, millennial postscript to The Jam’s That’s Entertainment, a harmonica-abetted Albion made light work of luring out the communal goosebump.

Later, it was the turn of another rapper, Lethal Bizzle, to deliver a cameo during La Belle Et La Bête. As he stepped back to bask in his moment, a casually dressed Moss strode on to sing the lines that she delivers on the song’s recorded version, then strode off again.

In this strange arena — the arena of Pete and Kate — the excitable baying that followed her brief appearance verged upon morbid hysteria. And yet, what was there to see? Away from the fleeting cameos, it mostly boiled down to one man playing spare, sometimes sweet paeans to his own dissolute bohemianism. By contrast, the audience’s fascination seemed to eclipse any spectacle on the stage. How fitting then that almost out of view, to the side of the stage, a painter was quietly getting on with the job of depicting it all.

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