There’s something incongruous at a PJ Harvey show about that Stars in their Eyes-style ripple of applause that takes hold when the throng recognises an old favourite. But, on the opening night of Harvey’s first UK tour in three years, Dress served up just such a moment. There was a communal purr of delight for a song about the desperation with which a woman can pin her hopes on a piece of evening wear.

Well, it was hardly Shirley Bassey sashaying into the opening notes of Goldfinger, but it did help to illustrate the intense bond that the 37-year-old Dorset singer enjoys with her fans.

For many of them this would have constituted a first chance to hear songs from Harvey’s new album White Chalk, released earlier that day. Bedecked with fairy lights and ornaments, a piano bore testament to a sparser shift in direction. But it was with her guitar that the singer – performing without a band – steadied her nerves. Like a ghost come to life from an old Victorian photograph, she stamped a stiletto heel on an FX pedal for a cacophonous, swampy Man-Size.

Then, not for the first time, the sublime gave way to the ridiculous as though Harvey had an FX pedal for that as well. Halfway through the song an insect had become lodged in her eye. “Does anyone have a compact mirror,” she asked? Momentarily, no one responded. It was as though no one could believe that such an empowered presence could require such a prosaic accessory.

Reconfigured from a 1998 B-side, Nina in Ecstasy had Harvey manning an electronic box set to sound like a harmonium. Two minutes into this haiku-like child ballad, her equipment packed up, and Harvey – seizing the moment – steered into the song’s coda, a surreal version of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep with appropriately modified lyrics: “Where’s your marbles gone?”

At times like this, she seemed less like a West Country Patti Smith – as many a review is wont to depict her – and more like the goth daughter of Pam Ayres.

On other occasions though, precedents for what we were watching were harder to pin down. By swapping guitar for autoharp, Down by the Water sounded like an English folk song.

Better still was the effect that the piano appears to have had on Harvey’s singing – it was a bit like finding an extra room in a seemingly familiar house. Her high, tremulous tones on The Mountain were revelatory. On White Chalk – “White chalk hills are all I’ve known/White chalk hills will rot my bones” – you realised that it was a song that, decades from now, might end up being played at her funeral.

Except who on earth could do it justice in her absence?

PJ Harvey plays on Saturday 29 September, 2007, at the Festival Hall, London

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