“Twenty years old, and still not quite ready to behave itself.”

Cat Power’s The Greatest was never really about being the best. It was always about something more elusive: doing better, feeling more, surviving the occasional catastrophe and finding some beauty in the wreckage. Twenty years on, it seems there are still plenty of people who want to come out and hear it. And, judging by the congregation at the Barrowland Ballroom, they know every word.

Despite a tour-wide prohibition on photographers, Cat Power, aka Chan Marshall, put on a show that was positively brimming with spirit and might. There wasn’t a phone in sight, which, in an age when audiences seem increasingly preoccupied with documenting their enjoyment rather than actually experiencing it, felt almost revolutionary. Here was a room full of people simply listening. Not filming, not checking their notifications, not trying to prove to strangers online that they’d had a good night.

Perhaps Marshall’s relatively elusive relationship with social media has something to do with it. Her online presence offers precious little in the way of constant self-promotion, and there’s something rather refreshing about an artist who understands that a life in music needn’t involve turning every waking moment into content.

Opening with the album’s title track, The Greatest, Marshall immediately settled into the soulful, unhurried world that made the record so enduring. The opening stretch was deliberately languid, almost teasingly so. Living Proof offered another soulful reprieve, before Could We loosened things up with a glorious tambourine shuffle and foot-stomping jazz interlude.

The Barrowlands was so quiet at points you could practically hear a pin drop. There was an intimacy to the performance that made the enormous room feel like someone’s living room. I’ve rarely witnessed an audience at the Barry’s so completely absorbed by a singer. It made for a lovely, inclusive atmosphere, with the crowd giving Marshall the kind of attention that performers must dream about.

Her voice remains a remarkable instrument: whiskey-soaked, husky and fragile, like a broken whisper carried on the wind. Yet there is nothing imprecise about it. She enunciates every lyric as though delivering a poem, each syllable given its own little moment of consideration.

Where Is My Love? was Cat Power at her finest: those whispered, almost epiphanic vocals creating an atmosphere that no amount of production could manufacture.

Then came The Moon, a personal favourite. I remember listening to it at full blast on my way up Buchanan Street during my university days, and it remains one of those songs that seems to have a direct line to a particular period of your life. Which made the decision to give it a rather peculiar, heavily processed, underwater-sounding vocal treatment all the more frustrating. I’m all for artists reinventing their own material, but the strange autotune effect seemed to remove precisely the fragile, human quality that made the original so beautiful.

It’s a criticism that would recur throughout the evening. There is something of the Alex Turner school of live performance creeping in here: take the songs everyone has come to hear, then rearrange, deconstruct or otherwise disguise them until they’re almost unrecognisable. Artistic reinvention is one thing; making a beloved song sound like a distant relative of itself is quite another.

Islands was dedicated to “all the freedom fighters”, those standing up against oppression. Given its references to blood diamonds and the wider politics of exploitation, it was a fitting declaration of solidarity. Marshall has never been an artist particularly interested in making things comfortable, and there was a welcome political conviction beneath the music.

After some onstage reflections on love and communication, she briefly disappeared while the musicians carried the evening forward.

The second set opened with I Don’t Blame You, accompanied by a running battle with the lighting technician, whom Marshall repeatedly asked to turn down the lights because the front row were being blinded. It was a wonderfully human interruption, and one of several reminders that this was not a meticulously choreographed pop spectacle.

A cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U, dedicated to Shane MacGowan, followed. It was a touching tribute, before Marshall moved into Kitty Wells’ It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels. The occasional awkward joke and conversational detour punctuated the set, although the devotees around me seemed to lap up every second.

Manhattan was perhaps the evening’s strangest excursion. The musicians played their backing parts perfectly, keeping everything in time, but Marshall seemed to embark on an entirely different journey. The lyrics wandered through references to voting for Trump, the Epstein files, freedom of speech and some rather elusive analogy involving the strong man and the strong woman. There were references to the President of the United States and the Mayor of Manhattan, too.

Perhaps there was a coherent political or artistic thread running through it all. Perhaps there wasn’t. The die-hard fans seemed perfectly happy to go along for the ride, and perhaps when you love an artist enough, you don’t particularly mind where they take you.

But for me, Manhattan was one of the songs I had been most looking forward to hearing, and this was something of a let-down. The musicians were faultless, but I found myself longing for the song rather than whatever strange, free-associative detour had replaced it. Artistic licence is one thing; when you’ve waited twenty years to hear a favourite, you can’t help hoping to recognise it.

The Pogues’ A Pair of Brown Eyes received a tremendous response, and deservedly so. Marshall seemed entirely at home inhabiting somebody else’s song, finding the sadness and romantic disrepair within it without simply attempting to imitate MacGowan.

James Brown’s Try Me provided another change of direction, demonstrating the breadth of her musical affection. The covers, in fact, were often where the evening’s more spontaneous character came into focus.

And then, as the show approached its conclusion, the spectacle was stripped back even further. For the final number, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, it was just Marshall and the guitarist, Munson, on stage. No grand production, no wall of sound, no elaborate musical arrangement to hide behind. Just a voice, a guitar and a song that has been played to death by practically everyone who has ever picked up an instrument.

It was an inspired way to finish. There was something deliciously understated about taking one of the biggest rock songs ever written and reducing it to that bare, intimate exchange. Earlier, I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby had been delivered a cappella, making the final stretch feel less like a conventional encore and more like an artist quietly reminding everyone what music can be when you take away the distractions.

For all the occasional eccentricities, the strange vocal processing and the moments when Marshall seemed to disappear down her own lyrical rabbit holes, this was a performance with genuine heart.

The Greatest may be twenty years old, but it hasn’t become a museum piece. Marshall is clearly not interested in simply reproducing the record for an audience nostalgic for their university days. Sometimes that instinct produces something wonderful; sometimes it leaves you wishing she’d just sung the bloody song as it was written.

But perhaps that’s the point. Cat Power has never been especially interested in giving people exactly what they expect. And while a little less autotune and a little more of that extraordinary, unvarnished voice wouldn’t have gone amiss, there was enough soul, mischief and musical conviction here to make the evening feel like something worth remembering.

Twenty years on, The Greatest is still a rather wonderful thing. And judging by the silence, the singing and the devotion inside the Barrowland Ballroom, its audience isn’t going anywhere.

Angela Canavan