She is the high priestess of punk, symbolist poet and feminist icon; he is the reclusive ex-leader of My Bloody Valentine who nearly bankrupted Creation Records in the early Nineties trying to capture the sound in his head.

They are an odd couple, but Patti Smith and Kevin Shields clicked when they improvised at last year's Meltdown festival. Now they are back to record their collaboration in front of a live audience on a stage resembling a home studio.

The first half was relatively trad. Backed on piano, guitar and cello, Smith, intense yet endearing, unveiled two righteous new songs: Qana, about the war in Lebanon, and Without Chains, about Guantanamo.

After the interval, Shields emerged, scruffy and withdrawn, and things got full on. Smith intoned The Coral Sea, a long elegy to her soulmate Robert Mapplethorpe, occasionally making deathly squeals with a clarinet, as Shields, surrounded by guitars and effects pedals, built shimmering layers of feedback, enveloping the auditorium in a womb of noise.

My friend thought it insufferably pretentious and unbearably dissonant; I found it mesmerically beautiful and was twice moved to tears. Nice to know music can still do that.