Siouxsie looked magical as she strode onto the gloomy stage. With her eyes blazing beneath a huge shock of hair and her statuesque figure encased in a black, red and gold harlequin catsuit, the 50-year-old singer resembled one of those Amazonian androids from Blade Runner as she ran through her repertoire of pirouettes and slow-motion karate kicks.

She began on a Middle Eastern jag, with two old favourites, Israel and Arabian Knights, her voice rising and falling in the ululating cadences that have so bewitched succeeding generations of artists from Björk to Bat for Lashes.

It has been several years since Siouxsie last performed on a London stage, and a great many years since she was the gothic-punk queen of all she surveyed. But time has done nothing to diminish her star quality. Stepping out to promote Mantaray, the first album of her 30-year career to have been recorded without the support of either the Banshees or the Creatures, she turned in a performance of magisterial authority, laced with her legendary froideur.

Siouxsie has recently divorced her long-time bandmate and soulmate Budgie, so the absence of his peroxided presence behind the drum kit came as no surprise. And if the five-person group accompanying her seemed a bit of a Banshees-by-numbers operation as they navigated old favourites including Night Shift and Dear Prudence, well what else would you expect?

A sequence of songs from the new album – About to Happen, Here Comes That Day and Loveless – took her into fresh territory without straying too far from the familiar template. If It Doesn’t Kill You was a dramatic, doomy ballad that came off like an alternative James Bond theme, while One Mile Below was marked by the swoops and swirls and jungle tom-tom beats that have always been a key element of her musical signature.

With the new material honourably dispatched, the encores were given over to a reprise of her biggest crowd-pleasing standbys, Hong Kong Garden and Spellbound, before an unexpected and surprisingly faithful cover of the Doors standard, Hello, I Love You, brought the curtain down. Goodbye, we loved you too.

4/5

David Sinclair