With an impending new album to promote, Yoko Ono has been out and about, scooping up “lifetime” awards in recognition of her work on the “front line”. She even found time to play her first UK gig with the Plastic Ono Band, as part of the Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre, curated this year by the revered saxophonist Ornette Coleman.

As a moment of cultural significance this was not an event to be taken lightly. Ono opened with Why, a number that she last performed 40 years ago, accompanied by John Lennon, Ringo Starr and Klaus Voorman. For this version she was accompanied by Sean Lennon on guitar, Mark Ronson on bass and Yuko Araki from the Cornelius band on drums.

Now 76, Ono cut an extraordinary figure in black, figure-hugging trousers and top, a big white beatnik hat and shades, as she delivered the one-word lyric in a sequence of stuttering shrieks, squawks, warbles and clucks. It sounded like a chicken undergoing primal scream therapy. Lennon, meanwhile produced a scrabble of equally discordant, overdriven noise from his fretboard, while the rhythm section clattered away behind.

Other musicians joined them: keyboard players, guitarists and a theremin player, Pamelia K, who conjured a lovely cello-like sound from her invisible “strings”. Lennon switched to bass, then piano and even took a turn at drums. The band played sympathetically, at times brilliantly, but Ono’s brittle caterwauling remains an acquired taste at best. It didn’t help that she had not even learnt the words to her own songs, which, during many numbers, she read from a sheet of paper in her hand.

Antony Hegarty appeared and applied his ethereal vocal tone to I’m Going Away Smiling, a number from the forthcoming album. A sad giant of a man next to the diminutive Ono, he immediately brought shape and melodic substance to the song, which featured Lennon on piano. Coleman, who played on the original Plastic Ono Band album released in 1970, appeared for an encore of Mindtrain. A commanding but fragile presence, he tootled away on a white horn, while Ono stood in mute appreciation at his side, a modus operandi that produced the best performance of the night.

It may have been an historic celebration of life on the front line, but you could see why most people would opt for something a little less atonally severe.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010