Lydia Lunch’s fearsome reputation may precede her, but she played a fairly conventional and even-tempered show in Brighton on Tuesday. Now based in Barcelona, the New York punk veteran calls her current performance style “illustrated word”, a combination of poetry and live music backed up by TV montages of photographs from her latest book, The Gun is Loaded. Bombed-out buildings, pubescent boys and animal skulls rank among her visual motifs.

Born Lydia Koch in 1959, Lunch ran away from a sexually abusive family at 16, finding refuge among Manhattan’s proto-punk bohemians. Channelling pain and anger into howling screeds of quasi-pornographic beat poetry, she became a missing link between Patti Smith and Courtney Love, although she remains more of a fringe figure than both.

Lunch has traded several musicians with Nick Cave over the years and this show featured the borrowed Bad Seeds guitarist Jim Johnston. Together with the percussionist Ian White, Johnston wove an alluring tapestry of discordant, propulsive, jazzy noise around the singer’s verbal marathons. Their best numbers had all the sultry melodrama of a spaghetti western, rising to an emotional crescendo during the climax of Lunch’s screeching diatribes.

Lunch is more Pam Ayres than Patti Smith nowadays, but she still favours a dark, ragged, dissonant aesthetic, drawing on much the same lyrical fixations as ever. Sex, death, violence, suicide, psychosis, patriarchal abuse of power and the apocalyptic sickness of America figured heavily. But mostly the old favourites: sex and death.

Of course, Lunch’s literary walks on the wild side have long lost their shock value. Four-letter rants about blood and semen sound quaintly adolescent at best. Thronged with middle-aged punk nostalgia fans, this show leant more towards supper-club cabaret than confrontational performance art.

Admittedly, Lunch has always contended that real life is far more brutal than anything she can imagine. But on good form, as here, she can still turn familiar lyrical obsessions into an intense, exotic, visceral racket.

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