Round Our Gaff

Upstairs at the Enterprise is stuffed to the gills, and four blokes are crammed onto the bijou stage, creating a delectable throb of tune-scorning noise. The keyboard player's mic stand begins to swish about as if in distress. The blond keyboard-wrangler scowls and steadies it. What tit is wiggling the stand around like that? Oh… it's the singer. Hai!

Mike Title – for it is he – takes to the stage with one tigerish bound and drags the noise kicking and screaming into the screamy, kicky_ 'Fear and Fluoride'_. His harsh Essex babblings and batshit-mental gaze make him impossible to ignore. But just to make sure, he stomps back off the stage and commences Operation Punter-Mess, seizing the wrists of a couple of giggling sitter-downers who allow themselves to be hauled upright like reluctant wedding guests being dragged onto the dancefloor. Then he clomps up onto a table and stands there, resplendent in his knee-length Camden-grade leopard coat and shouty. Full glasses topple to the floor. Liquid goes everywhere. He then charges, almost gracefully, sidelong into the crowd. Limbs go everywhere. Someone throws a full pint in his face. He doesn't even blink. It's all looking a bit fighty, but fortunately the air of hostility dissipates, and it becomes clear that a)* Dead Kids* are rather good at this whole post-post-Prodigy electro-headfuck lark, and b) the energy they fill a room with makes people their bitches, split pints or no.

There's none of the cymbal-immolation of Title's former band, Sona Fariq, but the music – a deft melange of the most piquant heavy stuff you used to like, polished up until it's modern as hell – has that same sense of rabid unpredictability about it. Shades of PiL being throttled by a testosterone-crazed gorilla, and rather getting off on it. How disgusting. More please.

Photo: Hannah Asprey