It’s a lonely life being a Laurie Anderson fan. Most you meet don’t know the name despite a career which has encompassed pioneering performance art, some of the first multi-media shows for the masses, and what’s still surely the most avant-garde top-ten hit in British pop history (O Superman – thanks to John Peel).

But if her rise – which included an improbably large record contract at the height of the 1980s boom – was powered by cutting-edge technology, recent years have seen her step back. For Saturday’s show, the De La Warr’s spotless modernist space was left uncluttered of screens, machines or dancers – the only props some scattered candles and dry ice. It’s her skill as a peculiarly modern storyteller that came to the fore.

It was the wit and depth of her strange, true-life stories that held her audience absolutely silent.

A trip to the North Pole folded into love amongst the Amish; a nightmarish stay in a ward for wounded children into going undercover at a New York fast food chain just last year.

It was heartening to note that such challenging fare could still fill an auditorium with possibly the entire population of university lecturers for miles around.

For all this, Anderson’s trademark technology was still present, just cleverly recessed – the glacial synths that underpinned each sentence (her voice often electronically treated) weaved moods in the manner of a church organ. Meanwhile, a light show perfectly colour-matched the tone of her words – the stage flooded by turn doleful blue, austere white and intense red.

Perhaps she’s realised that technology works all the better when we don’t see it. So this was still multi-media, this was still avant-garde. Forty years into a near-peerless career, this sprightly veteran is still more future-facing than most artists young enough to be her offspring. “She’s late,” said my show-going companion at 8.05pm. “No,” I replied, “the rest of us are just catching up.”