It's a big night on London's electro-rock calendar. Across town, potty-mouthed rapper Peaches is doing her tit-shaking, dildo-caressing thang, having recently welded gnarly, AC/DC-styled riffage onto her grubby synth rock.
And right here, right now, tantalisingly untouchable, uniformed post-futurists Ladytron are playing their biggest headline show to date, proving to both their faithful and the undecided that there's more than one way to skin this electro-pop cat.
If there's one problem with being a maverick, it's that when the rest of the posse finally decides that yours is indeed quite the coolest hitching post in town, even if you tied up first, who can tell? All the spectator sees is a crowd with ropes entangled. Much of Ladytron's debut album, '604' consisted of material written well before the millennium and let's face it, no one else was much bothered with synth rock then.
Now, every bugger's at it. Richard X has just delivered an entire album of 'official bootlegs', pilfering everyone from Gary Numan to Flying Lizards and helping to flog both make-up and faltering girl groups as he goes. All post-ironic power to him. Ladytron, however, are doing what they've always done, only now far, far more forcefully - dancing groovily and unstoppably into the future, polishing electro-pop with their own attitude and sly wit as they go.
Tonight, it's understandably the punchier, more immediate tunes from current album 'Light & Magic' that dominate. They open, however, with 'Commodore Rock' from '604' - in which Mira Aroyo sharply raps out her Bulgarian vocals over a barrage of stuttering synths - then groove on through the darkly swirling, Banshees-toned 'Cracked LCD', bop-tastic single, 'Playgirl' and on to the cool, compulsively linear 'Cease2xist'.
They encore with the sweet 'Seventeen', their giddy version (now a set staple) of Tweet's 'Oops (Oh My)' and close with a new cover - of Cabaret Voltaire's 'Nag Nag Nag' - which happily they make over in their own image rather than simply offer up as homage. Despite their robo-chic, Ladytron are very much a working pop band, rather than a bunch of studio-bred, DAT-driven androids.
En route to the dance floor, they're neatly joining the dots between Kraftwerk (who clearly occupy a special place in their hearts), Giorgio Moroder, New Order and Chicago house with fine-tuned, yet funky precision. One sharp eye on their heritage, certainly, but ever striking out for the clear, fresh waters of re-creation.
