Being Alanis Morissette has become a mighty frustrating business. Still one of rock's bestselling female artists - thanks almost exclusively to her 13-year-old album Jagged Little Pill - she now struggles to have hits and plays to crowds such as the one in Glasgow who barely acknowledge her Noughties output but burst into song at the start of every classic track.

Morissette's response has been to reinvent herself as a tough rock chick, which made for some entertaining, if not entirely convincing, onstage antics. A new song, Moratorium, was an overblown opener, built on broody synths, begun in darkness by a bombastic, five-piece band and sung by an out-of-sight Morissette. When she did appear to deafening cheers, she was dressed as though going for a country stroll - comfortable jeans, short-sleeved, chiffon shirt and little, leather waistcoat - but behaved like a woman deranged. During Uninvited, a Grammy award-winning song from a decade ago, the Canadian singer hurled herself backwards and forwards, bent at the waist so far that her hair swept the floor and threatened to trip her up. She headbanged on her knees, duelled on guitar with her guys and bounced like a kangaroo.

It was easy to feel Morissette's exasperation. Eight Easy Steps, from her 2004 album Under Rug Swept, was superb, a rumbling blend of Eastern-tinged electronics, hard-rock guitars and her magnificent vocals at their most tuneful, but it was received with a shrug of indifference. Yet the second she began All I Really Want on harmonica the crowd went crazy. That the band had planned a metal-tinged version of the track, complete with squalling solos and thundering drums, hardly mattered. Fans were too busy singing to notice.

A run of songs from the current album, Flavors of Entanglement, included the beautiful ballad Not As We and the thumpingly tuneless rocker In Praise of the Vulnerable Man. Both were met with a rush to the bar. While Morissette may long to move on, the predominantly female audience who wailed painfully through Head Over Feet, drowned her out on You Oughta Know, endured a horribly rearranged Hand in my Pocket that tried to channel Bob Dylan and hugged each other during an epic Ironic, would prefer the singer to stay locked in her mid-1990s incarnation. Sorry, Alanis, it's a stalemate.

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