Silver Rocket 6th birthday

The last time Collapse's frenzied punk rock flailed and fought its way out of invisible paper bags before these eyes, they numbered but three men; tonight, though, technical gremlins see another pair of legs and thick-rimmed specs take to the stage, in order to keep a misfiring bass amp in order.

Said instrument's miniature mangler - we shall call him Steve for that is his name - adopts a brave face throughout; when he's not smiling into the face of adversity, he's fellating the microphone with an action so smooth it's a wonder his breath doesn't reek of Castrol GTX come the set's end, when he'll join the assembled revellers on the Buffalo Bar's dance floor to celebrate Silver Rocket's sixth birthday. DiS will dance, too, but only briefly: the same fiery frontman's dizzying moves put our awkward shuffle to no little shame.

But back to those gremlins: they cackle and cat-call, but are ultimately beaten into a gooey pulp by our trio of persistent punk-rockers, whose sweaty straight-ahead ploughing of a furrow so jagged it'd break a snail's single foot barely suffers for its unfortunately enforced stop-start execution. Vocals are brash, brittle and blood-curdling in their draping of magnificent menace over indecipherable screams; riffs never bother themselves with twiddling-into-a-corner complexities, leaving the front row both scorched and coerced into a little more than foot-tapping.

DiS nods, harder and harder, hair sticking to eyelids and ears but any annoyance ignored in favour of concentrating on Collapse's seconds-away-from-explosion riot-rock; each song is a Molotov with its fuel-soaked rag a little too short for comfort, each bead of sweat that falls from a protagonist's brown burns the stage like an HR Giger alien's acidic saliva. Granted, this performance is far from the trio's finest set to date - even by such purveyors of the imperfect's standards, Collapse are loose to the point of requiring braces to keep them affixed to the floor - but those aforementioned equipment faults can be at least partially blamed for any newcomer indifference.

For the initiated, it's another typically intense twenty-odd minutes, and for DiS it's enough to have us hoping that one day Collapse don't punch their way through their paper prison. That way we could carry them home, to consume at our leisure, like birthday cake in a doggy bag. Delicious.

Photograph by Lucy Johnston