Kristin Hersh had a traumatic 1980s. She formed a band, US indie-rock icons Throwing Muses, when she was just 14, and thereafter had to deal with the pressures of cult stardom, becoming a teenage mother and battling the voices in her head that eventually led to her being diagnosed as schizophrenic. She was hospitalised as the decade ended.

Hersh has distilled that troubled time into a part-spoken-word, part-music performance named Paradoxical Undressing. The title describes the bizarre medical condition whereby people suffering from severe hypothermia inexplicably remove clothes or blankets, and it defines the contradictions of this cripplingly shy singer who chooses to bare her soul in the spotlight.

The main body of the performance consists of Hersh gently strumming the electric guitar as she reads aloud her teenage diary entries. Sometimes amusingly precocious, they grow more intense and visceral when she begins to spiral towards breakdown, describing hallucinations, self-harming and an ultimate surrender of identity: "The music is real - I'm not."

Hersh punctuates this harrowing litany with songs from both Throwing Muses' and her own solo catalogues; during these interludes, she appears transported. "It sings to me with glassy eyes, and quotes from Kafka," she growls during Fish. Delicate Cutters and the scarily vulnerable Hook in Her Head somehow manage to sound simultaneously spectral and cathartic.

Hersh is a tremendous poet and an engaging host, and this candid performance, a magnificently charged union of Sylvia Plath and Patti Smith, is received in reverent silence throughout. It is hard to think of any other contemporary music star who would even attempt it.