You might have heard people talking about Henry Rollins‘ spoken word shows. They might have told you how surprised they were at how genial, clear-sighted and hysterically funny he is as a speaker. They may even have told you that the former Black Flag singer is a match for any stand-up comic on the circuit. But you probably won’t believe them until you see it for yourself.

To look at Henry Rollins (and indeed, to listen to anything from his back catalogue, from Black Flag to his later eponymous band), you’d never imagine that behind the bulging muscles, US Marines-style crew cut, tattoos and bulbous eyes there lies a true raconteur (passages about masturbation notwithstanding, of course). But this is inspired and inspiring stuff, centring around an infectious enthusiasm for discovering all the hidden pockets of global civilisation for himself. It’s enough to make you want to explore central Baghdad on a weekend break the next time a bank holiday comes around, and we’d put money on more than a few members of the audience booking themselves plane tickets to somewhere obscure and dangerous the second they got home.

As is to be expected given These Times In Which We Live, much of the material is given over to scathing attacks on US foreign policy, starting with a reprise of Bush’s difficulties with the English language, which Rollins covered on his 2004 world tour in some detail, but which provides such a rich vein of comic potential that he has a second go at it here. Elsewhere, there’s everything from airport security searches to an extended sequence about Van Halen fans that’s worth the entrance fee alone.

Rollins’ delivery throughout is breathless – rattling through a two-hour set of rants, invective and old-fashioned guess-what-happened-to-me anecdotes without pausing for even so long as to mop his brow. More impressively, he has that rare skill of making everyone in the room feel like he’s talking to them and them alone, effectively taking 500-odd people down the pub to tell them stories about his holidays. Except for Rollins, his holidays include tours of Cambodia’s killing fields and central Afghanistan, and his anecdotes happen to include bumping into David Lee Roth and Cat Stevens.

Hilarious, thought-provoking and utterly absorbing, in places this feels like the closest thing to the late Bill Hicks currently doing the rounds, and we can barely offer higher praise than that.