Brigitte Fontaine's debut London show starts without her. The multicultural band take the stage and begin grinding out a propulsive dance beat laced with eerie, sampled flute notes and screeches from a violin. When Fontain appears, her wiry body and shaved head are swathed in red chiffon that gleams like dripping blood. Moving stiffly across the stage, growling incomprehensibly, she could be a recently interred cadaver come back to take her revenge. It's a suitably startling entry for a singer-actor whose career has entwined chanson and caberet, but hardly what you would expect from a 61-year-old woman who first found fame in Paris's theatres in 1963. Over the past four decades Fontaine has disregarded her fluctuating popularity and continued recording and performing, becoming a cult figure to today's hip young things. Her most recent album, last year's Kékéland, dominates this set; like most of Fontaine's music, it is a fusion of French balladry with Arabic melodies (supplied by her long-standing partner Areski Belkacem), here melded with hip-hop and the occasional slash of rock guitar. The combination can be alarming, as on the abrasive Demie Clocharde, where Fontaine's still beautiful, lilting voice is swamped by a relentlessly pounding beat. God's Nightmare, a slab of lacklustre hip-hop topped with some staccato rap in surreal English, is simply imprudent. NRV ("énervé", annoyed) provides an unsettling glimpse of her past antics in devised theatre: fontaine adopts a series of bizarre, buckled poses, creeping around a young man who, for no discernible reason, stands beside her, palms spread, body glowing in white T-shirt and jeans. Misguided as such a moment feels, it is impossible not to admire Fontaine as one of the few singers of her generation still striving to create something idiosyncratic and modern. And more often than not, the results are marvellous. Pipeau is a satisfying satire on love and tangos, while Sifini is a sprightly marriage of banjo and warm singing. Y'a des Zazous positively bounces along, a colourful comic-strip of a song not unlike Serge Gainsbourg at his most effervescent. Best of all is Profond: the band pares back to violin, cello and piano, Fontaine's voice drips tears, passion, sex and betrayal, and in five minutes the quartet conjure up one of those pretentious arthouse movies about adultery that no one makes quite like the French.