From the moment he walked on stage in a glittering 70s glam rock-style cape with an armless and legless mannequin that he introduced to us as Lionel Messi, you knew what sort of night you were going to have in the company of the inimitable Noel Fielding.

There was a little nod to stand-up at the beginning, with the star of The Mighty Boosh and Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy pacing up and down the stage, wondering aloud how on earth he’d got to the age of 41, talking to a Scottish woman in the front row about being Scottish, and relating to us tales of the two whole ‘proper’ jobs he had before he went into comedy.

Then, just as we were starting to think we’d got our heads around this whole thing, he was picking ‘Messi’up – “Let’s have a little kiss” – before suddenly flapping his arms around wing-style and squawking at us “I’m a chicken man!” and launching into a minutes-long monologue stroke demonic possession episode about a character that is half-man, half-chicken that he has previously described as ‘a cross between A Streetcar Named Desire and Foghorn Leghorn’.

As Noel himself – momentarily dropping out of character – said: “Yep, this is where this one is starting. Go with it.”

The rest of the evening was made up of what I can only describe as a very, very funny blend of half-animated fantasy, panto and storytelling, with occasional dips into reality, with a whole host of characters including the fabulous The Moon along with his evil alter-ego The Dark Side of the Moon, Sergeant Raymond Boombox, and the quixotic modern-day Fantasy Man, with forays into his dreams about being a teabag, the Plasticine world of Joey Ramone, and a love triangle with a triangle.

Not every single thing worked but – being delivered with such childish delight and by bringing us into the workings of his surreal imagination – the thing as a whole definitely did.