Earlier today, the news breaks that Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri's partnership in Queens Of The Stone Age has been dissolved. From now on, the Queens will be steered entirely by Homme. On the surface, it confirms what many suspected about him: that he's a powerful figure whose partying and kinship with Oliveri was always sublimated by a need to be in charge.
The idea of Homme as a control freak doesn't, however, quite fit with his appearance onstage tonight. In The Eagles Of Death Metal, he's the drummer, dwarfing a tiny kit. Upfront is a man with a walrus moustache and tight white vest who looks like a Tom Of Finland illustration come to life and goes by the name of Jesse 'The Devil' Hughes. Homme may not be the boss here, but his impeccable – if preposterous – taste is stamped all over his new band. The Eagles Of Death Metal don't sound much like either component of their name, or even much like "bluegrass stripper dance music", as Homme described them to me last summer. Instead, they're a delirious hybrid of Devo, early ZZ Top and, well, Queens Of The Stone Age, all robotic southern boogie and camp satanism. Homme's girlfriend, Brody Dalle, has certainly chosen a fine (not to mention nepotistic) opening act.
The other two supports aren't bad, either. Seattle's Pretty Girls Make Graves are a bit too complicated for their own good at times, though their attempts to precisely cross the sound of At The Drive-In with that of Sleater-Kinney remains both laudable and optimistic. Peaches, meanwhile, in front of this rapturous crowd, seems less like a performance art provocateur and more like a real punk icon. Now we've got over the fact that she's rude and changes her knickers a lot onstage, Peaches' true value emerges: as a performer who celebrates the interface between music and sex. Her tunes are getting better, her wrestler's cape is magnificent, she can spit fake blood an enormous distance into the crowd, and her duet with a video screen projection of Iggy Pop on "Kick It" is the highlight of an unusually thrilling evening.
It's a tough act which Dalle and The Distillers seem unlikely to match, on the evidence of their last, scrappy and illness-stricken London show. Tonight, though, is much better. Tighter and more charismatic this time round, "Die On A Rope", "Hall Of Mirrors" and "Drain The Blood" are all fantastically visceral ramalams, while the hotwired anthem, "City Of Angels", is ostensibly what Courtney Love tried and failed to sound like on "America's Sweetheart".
They remain a little one-dimensional, and probably play for 15 minutes too long. But Dalle is a terrific singer – hoarse, impassioned, imposing – and the sort of songwriter whose best is definitely to come. And if tonight's stand-out song – a charmingly slovenly version of the 13th Floor Elevators' psych-garage classic, "You're Gonna Miss Me" – is anything to go by, then expanding her range beyond the punk remit should be her next challenge. After all, with a boyfriend drumming in that bluegrass stripper band, she must've learned to live with eclecticism by now.
