Taking a break from live shows with The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the amazingly operatic, progressive artiste extraordinaire brought his An Evening With show to Oxford.

This is not your average Cellar gig however. It’s seated, for a start, and the audience is mostly middle-aged. On stage, two floor-to-ceiling screens show a close-up of Brown applying war paint to his 70-plus face, while Amerindian music plays.

The gig has sold out and the crowd share their anticipation/apprehen-sion, but, despite the premise, we have no idea what to expect.

Eventually Brown arrives on stage pulling a travel-case and waits in line to have his passport checked by an on-screen customs guard. It’s a strong start and sets up the show’s over-arching conceit: this passport flags up a colourful history, for which the singer is detained and made to answer, eliciting his tales.

His interrogator (played by sidekick Angel Fallon) looks like an air hostess and talks like Agent Smith from The Matrix, picking over Brown’s past. Occasionally she indulges in a pantomime aside, reporting to a mysterious authority that appears on-screen in the form of a Lovecraftian villain who seems to want to channel Brown’s memory-charged brain energy into some nefarious plan.

Fortunately, the “long-haired, big-nosed boy from Leeds” puts up no fight whatsoever and proceeds to regale us like the guest speaker at an outsiders’ convention. The two-part performance is a story-collage of archive, music videos, comic strips and abstract intermissions.

Highlights include an appearance at Italy’s inaugural Pallermo Rock and Pop Festival that got Brown locked up for indecent exposure, only for him to end up in solitary confinement after bursting into Little Richard while on courtyard exercise; and the admission that “the last thing to come back after a brain haemorrhage is your sense of humour.”

Indeed, it is Brown’s wit and candour that sustain the evening and saves it from self-indulgence.

But it’s the songs, few and far between, that really shine and remind us what an extraordinary voice Brown has, made all the more amazing by how well-preserved his range is after all these years (and substances).

One song in particular – a sublime delta-blues number on a Seasick Steve-style custom slide – comes out of nowhere and kills the audience.

There should be more strategically placed songs, but, all-in-all, it’s an entertaining and intriguing work of idiosyncrasy and one that The Cellar should be proud to have let out of its box.

Humphrey Astley