For those of us who believe that the poet of Salvador is the most interesting musician on the planet, his last two appearances have been mildly disappointing. Last year’s slot in the Barbican’s hippieish “Tropicália” season was a scrappy collaboration with his son, Moreno. While this latest show – drawing on the recent album Cê – was more focused, the emphasis on austere rock rhythms gave the evening a monochrome aura.

When he has his long-time musical director, the cellist Jaques Morelenbaum, alongside him, Veloso is capable of mastering just about anything, from Neapolitan ballads to rootsy samba. This time, however, he came with a stripped-down band: guitar, bass and drums. It was as if we had been transplanted from the exotic splendours of Rio into the urban canyons of São Paulo.

Anyone who heard Veloso’s Nirvana cover on the English-language album A Foreign Sound will know that Veloso – now grey-haired and bespectacled – is quite at home in the rock idiom. His young musicians, too, played with absolute assurance, the guitarist Pedro Sa always the calm centre of the storm. Um Sonho and Homem – two of the numbers from the new disc – exuded an authentic downtown flavour.

But it was the older songs that made the strongest impression. On Um Tom the band throttled back, the spare lines evoking the serenity of Japanese ritual music. Sampa skipped playfully over a self-consciously chugging backdrop.

What we didn’t get was the acoustic solo ballad sequence that is usually a centrepiece of Veloso’s dates. There was a lyrical detour into an old favourite, Coração Vagabundo, but, after that, Veloso resumed his original course.

Towards the end, Veloso gave us London, London, that delightfully naive sketch of an exile’s life, written more than 30 years ago after he was banished by Brazil’s military authorities. If this wasn’t, by his extraordinary standards, a vintage night, the song still captured an era in a few breathless phrases.

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