The Argus: Brighton Festival Thumb Laurie Anderson is a magician with words and music, a tale-spinner who plays electric violin and tells stories peppered with digressions that seem inconsequential but are not.

You come out of her one-woman shows feeling wiser for having seen them without quite being able to put your finger on why.

The confection she served up at the Dome, entitled Delusion, had all the trademark Anderson components: the seat for intimate chats with the audience, the screens on which were projected stunning visuals, the desk at which she played keyboards and spoke, and the violin on which she brewed up interludes both savage and beautiful.

But while the joy of Anderson is usually losing yourself in the byways of her narrative, a theme of death and decay unified this show.

It was ever present and interwove the public and personal. A digression into space travel touched down on the national trauma of America’s decline.

A hilarious discussion about identity was followed by a disturbing dream sequence with, on screen, an apparently dying woman. Anderson asked why it always rained in her dreams and told us how the cold of Chicago winters killed its old.

Then came the emotional punch as she talked about her mother’s death and the lack of love in their relationship.

Yet Delusion was not gloomy. Anderson talked of curiosities, she told jokes, she was chronically curious, never judgmental, and the music was entrancing.

And, as always with this most compelling of artists, the sum was greater than the parts.