Goran Bregović was a rock star in the former Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s, but he has since moved on to become a successful if controversial exponent of Balkan Gypsy music. Although he doesn't actually come from a Gypsy family, his international career has been based around reworking Gypsy styles for the mass market – and doing so despite complaints of plagiarism, to which he answers "I borrow from traditional material".

His career has been helped by his film work, particularly for Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies, and he began this London concert with a series of mood pieces that were finely performed by the vocalists, but ranged from the epic to the soporific, and needed a film to accompany them.

On this current tour, he is backed by the 18 musicians and singers of his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra as well as a string quartet, five brass players, a drummer, two female singers in Gypsy costumes and a six-piece male choir in dinner jackets. Bregović, dressed sharply in a white suit, took centre stage perched on a stool with his electric guitar.

What his adoring audience really wanted was a Gypsy knees-up, and of course he obliged. The lengthy set was carefully constructed to include regular bursts of rapid-fire brassy dance songs, but he failed to match the invention or enthusiasm of the greatest Balkan Gypsy bands, Fanfare Ciocărlia or Boban and Marko Marković. The best sections had nothing to do with either his arty compositions or frantic Gypsy dance. Irish singer Selina O'Leary was brought on to perform Bregović's new Champagne for Gypsies, but she was even better with a Gypsy-influenced version of The Galway Girl. Bregović later followed with an unlikely treatment of Lee Dorsey's Ya Ya, and a slinky In the Death Car, which he wrote and recorded with Iggy Pop. And now he really did sound original.

• What have you been to see lately? Tell us about it on Twitter using #GdnGig