It's all wrong. The Royal Festival Hall, home of symphoniettas, piano recitals and ageing Radio 4 lovers, is playing host to a man whose pseudonyms include You've Got Foetus On Your Breath and Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel.
The man in question being one Jim Foetus (aka Thirlwell), whose seedy electronica is credited as giving birth (ho ho) to Nine Inch Nails and just about every industrial band post-1980.
We shouldn't be in a cavernous chamber, with set seating, ushers and no smoking signs. This should be a sleazy dive, stinking of stale beer and fags, where people snog each other indiscriminately and slam dance for England.
But as far as Thirwell is concerned, this is a sleazy dive. Throughout, he grinds his groin and feels himself up, oozing filthy sex in filthier alleyways. You might expect it from a guy, dressed, like his band, in black leather trousers.
That it comes from a bloke who looks like a washed up seventies cabaret singer, in hideous shirt and red slacks which clash with his ginger locks (later exchanged for an equally clashing gold lame bodysuit) bizarrely adds to the seduction, and makes it both strange and semi-ironic.
You certainly can't accuse Foetus of taking himself too seriously. Like The Cramps, there's a tongue in cheek humour behind both these onstage dramatics and the snarling blackness of his dirty blues.
He might sing of maniac stalkers and scary losers, but there's enough Vaudeville kitsch about it to stop you sh**ting yourself - even when the drums of 'Friend Or Foe' foretell doom like the four apocalyptic horsemen, and the slow beats and skewed church organ of 'Your Salvation' make you feel the world is diseased.
No, as the tracks flow into one another, with Thirlwell alternately shrieking and crooning over feedback, as keyboards scream and guitars get deeper and darker, you just find yourself vowing to kick an usher if they try to stop you from slamdancing down the front, as you lose yourself in his sexed-up industrial universe.
