When did the people of London acquire such a high tolerance for this experimental music lark that they became prepared to shell out thirty of their hard-earned, increasingly worthless and grubby-looking pounds for the right to sit in the same room as a man tuning his guitar whilst another man shouted at him for an hour? If ever there was a Meltdown performance which I thought would struggle to find an audience it was this. But there we all were in our expensively comfy QEH seats, looking pretty relaxed and (for the most part) not in the slightest perplexed by this meeting of two disciples of Ornette by way of John Zorn: Fred Frith and Mike Patton.

I said to my companion for the evening (who has asked not to be named lest he be pilloried for associating with idiots like me, which would be the least he deserves frankly) that this was one of those shows which would be either great or rubbish, and on that basis it would be great. If you know what I mean. And so it was. The first half was great in the sense of actually being great. Mike Patton built huge gothic soundscapes from voice, electronics, and feedback. Frith treated his instrument like some sort of activity centre, doing more fiddling with knobs and hitting it with things than actually playing it in a conventional sense. He would play something on his ridiculously-tuned guitar, look at it quizzically, and then fiddle with the tuning until it sounded even more ridiculous, but ridiculous in a way that evidently met with his satisfaction (and which somehow seemed to work). Patton’s backgrounds provided a pulsing, vaguely rhythmic framework for Frith to interact with, which in turn pushed Patton to greater and greater vocal exhortations.

The second half was great, but in that other sense, the sense of being a bit rubbish, but amusingly so, and thereby giving us something to have a good old communal giggle about in the bar afterwards. Picture a scene as I’ve just described, with Patton’s drones and evil whispering meshing with Frith’s harsh guitar scrapes under the dim lights. Then welcome onto the stage a very confused UK beatboxing champion, who proceeds to drop his usual set of hip-hop beats and scratches all over the top, flicking his hands at all these imaginary switches and records. It was so wildly inappropriate that I (along with Mike Patton, I noticed) couldn’t help but laugh. You know that dream where you are at work without any trousers on? To poor Shlomo’s credit, he seemed to realise just how utterly pantless he was, and for the next piece he opted just to mutter rhythmically. Patton soon tired of this too, dragging the piece back to the dungeon with some ear-splitting screams, although that only seemed to panic Shlomo further – I swear he began mumbling “will you marry me?”. And when he finished, someone in the audience stated, quite firmly and without giving me any indication that there was any real love involved, perhaps just being overcome with manly excitement in the improvisational heat of the moment: “Yes.”