When it came to my turn to sing at my own wedding reception everyone with a functional wheelchair and those who could walk or crawl vacated the hall within thirty seconds. When Mrs Mac says “Liam, you sing better than that” it’s not a compliment. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s singing voice could empty a room twice as quickly as mine.

Or so I’d have thought. She struggles to hold a note.

The last time I saw Ms Gainsbourg was when I watched her film Antichrist. This was just about the most unpleasant, pretentious, futile, meaningless bit of movie making I’ve ever seen since Transformers 2. At least the Transformers kept their clothes on throughout and didn’t do anything eye wateringly nasty to anyone’s dangly bits. Tonight was the vocal equivalent.

Gainsbourg made a pretty well received album last year with the estimable Beck based around that staple rock and roll theme of recovering from a cerebral haemorrhage. Lonnie Donegan was the first to do it; Mud had a concept album on the subject and Aphex Twin’s new live show revisits the same idea.

The track in the video samples an MRI machine (IRM in French) and the album is more musically adventurous than you might expect from a member of France’s most famous dynasty. In much the same way that an episode of Star Trek is always being shown somewhere you can be confident of never being more than half an hour away from a reference to one the Gainsbourgs or Jane Birkin on French TV. On this side of the water they are rather more a niche taste. Tuesday’s audience at Shepherd’s Bush seemed to comprise the young, the beautiful, the achingly trendy and me. They must be very nice people because they applauded every song and gave a convincing impression of enjoying themselves. I barely suppressed an urge to heckle and seemed to be the only one who laughed during the performance. Try to imagine a very tight indie tinged electronic band with good arrangements and strong songs auditioning a tone deaf singer who is too nervous to engage with the audience. That’s what the show felt like.

Apparently she gets a fair bit of flak for being the child of famous parents which gives her privileged access to film and recording studios. Butchers’ sons and daughters probably get into abattoirs more easily than the rest of this so you can see how it might happen. Sometimes you roll up to a show hoping to be wrong but tonight’s performance seemed to prove the point. If you had to select the nadir her version of Just Like a Woman would win the prize. For an encore she did a calypso style number by her father which pleased his many fans in the room. The contrast between his louche charisma and this indulgent celebrity fiasco was stark.