It's been 30 years since Scott Walker last played a full live concert. Tonight at the Barbican an extensive cast of musicians, including a 42-piece orchestra, have assembled to perform songs from his last two albums, but Walker is not among them. The man with the strangest career trajectory in pop - from Sixties heartthrob with the Walker Brothers to plain-chanting, pork-thumping recluse - hides behind a baseball cap in the back seats while Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn and other vocalists intone his words.

This is not for the faint of heart. Tilt and The Drift are dark, turbulent records, dauntingly opaque and hostile to the casual listener. Anyone who strolled in expecting 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore' will get a shock when, a minute into 'Clara', a song about the public execution of Mussolini and his mistress, a boxer starts pummelling a pig carcass onstage.

This production, directed by Ann-Christin Rommen, brings visual elements and dance to Walker's music. However, the images that his lyrics throw up can be so arresting, like stabs of light out of the dark, and there is so much deranged theatre in the orchestration (adroitly conducted here), that the visual accompaniments often seem superfluous.

Cocker and Albarn, who bookend the show, provide some of its best moments. The former takes time out from reading a newspaper to announce that 'Cossacks are charging in/ Into fields of white roses' before pointing out: 'That's a swanky suit'. The latter sings 'Farmer in the City' in wellies, flanked by suited men with soil faces and grass hair. ('Can't go by a man with brain grass,' he warns.) There is levity amid the doom and gloom; locating it, and clinging on for dear life, is the surest way through to the other side.