Line-up creation is an art all of it’s own, it would seem. To make sure that the support don’t outclass the headliners, to make sure that the support ‘warm-up’ the crowd rather than send them flocking to the bar, and perhaps most importantly, to have supports who actually compliment headliners aesthetically. Tonight’s line-up seems to have been created with complete disregard of the third maxim – Sister Morphine’s competent foo-fighting cock and roll has it’s value, but it bears little relation to the Shortwave Set’s victoriana cut-and-paste folk. The greatest similarity would be in their respective female singer’s immaculate fringed haircuts; Sister Morhpine’s Maudie is the image of Jennifer Herrema, just dressed in head-to-toe topshop rather than phosphorescent threads of sheer excess and decay. In perfect harmonic thirds they sing of “crying in their sleep at night,” but I don’t believe them – they don’t look like they believe themselves – this all seems too calculated. In calculated outfits, playing calculated chords, calculated guitar squeals and squaws; it’s just like the Subways grew up and turned the volume up. Cynicism cast aside for a moment (and it’s hard flu-ridden and sneezing every third drumbeat) there are enticing ingredients here – two pitch-perfect rock singers all VV and Hotel Kills, note-perfect performance, a full set of memorable grunge-lite songs, all Queens of the Stone Age without any of the drug-infliction. It’s just I can’t relate to rock n’ roll that’s so organised.

Organisation isn’t to be associated with The Shortwave Set. They appear to be an assortment of back-street antique shop owners, bringing with them their collection of thrifted instruments: autoharp, ye olde gramophone, banjo, jawharp, a harmonica with horns sprouting out of it, miscellaneous lightning shaking box, miscellaneous bicycle horns, miscellaneous children’s keyboard flute. They are off to a precarious start: the microphone stand refuses to be adjusted, sound levels are unstable, they nearly play the same song twice in a row. The rusty mechanism does slowly shake itself into optimum performance: ‘Is It Any Wonder?’ is heady with wrong-speed psalmic vocal samples, looping romantisch piano and lily-white singing. ‘Slingshot’ chops up blues piano and renegade harp into old-world tranquil funk. In their roll-neck jumpers with their cornucopia of instruments surrounding them, the Shortwave Set play with sounds so long-forgotten they must’ve been trapped under floorboards for years, gathering dust in ever-closed seaside antique shops, shut up in edwardian attics despatched from their owner’s memories. The trouble with antique shops is always the clutter, and the Shortwave Set have just a little too much – with samples and melodies so beautiful buried under piles of junk, it’s hard to breathe for all the dust in the air. My head is thick enough already with fuzzy headache and weighty sinuses – I wish that the sounds had more room to resonate. Perhaps it doesn’t help that we are in a sweatbox of a venue suited to claustrophobic guitar wreckage. If I could just close my eyes and relocate to an art-deco ballroom, looking out across garden terraces onto a very still ocean, the clutter and this schmaltzy shtick wouldn’t seem so awkward and out of place.