Liars

Art for art's sake? In a world where shitting on a bed and placing a half eaten kebab inside a glass cabinet is considered "art", it's perhaps no surprise that 1/3 of tonight's offering had to involve artistic merit of a similar variety but I guess you shouldn't tar everyone with the same brush, right?

Maybe there's an ideal world out there that sees T-square stripped sideburns and sherbet tasting cushions; where Mark E Smith reigns supreme, president of good taste, while constricting the mediocre to blighten his name with insipid plagiarism, while Kathleen Hanna looks on, bored to pieces by the tuneless ineptitude that surrounds her.

Fortunately, this only describes one third of tonight's impressively titled billing.

Chief Liar, Angus Andrew, is probably more famous for being being the guy that goes out with Bobby Gillespie's twin sister Karen, although once upon a time his band did release a halfway decent album that sort of redefined experimental, "angular" - and God that word grates on me - polemic pop to a point whereby everyone claimed to love Andy Partridge and sing with an American accent while shaking maracas and tapping the tom-toms.

Sadly, tonight they opted not to play any of that album, instead choosing to inflict what at times appeared to be an idle 45 minute jam bereft of any tune or discerning level of inticracy whatsoever.

If they couldn't be arsed tonight, then neither can I when it comes to praising them, so I won't.

Instead, I'll reserve my energies for the aural subversions of Punish The Atom, whose intensely documented noise projections get more addictively sporadic with every performance.

Frontman Joey Bell pirouettes across the monitors in a manner that would make Wayne Sleep blush, while the angry ballast of 'Negative' snaps at several hundred prone eardrums in a way only Mr E Smith could wish to emulate.

Manchest-ah's finest son would be impressed, and he's not alone.

If the subliminal reigned true and seminal propensity was all we had to base our opinions on, then KaitO would have to be diagnosed as one of Alan Partridge's wet dreams.

Coming straight out of Norwich with a 50-50 male:female ratio would have certain radio presenters crying "diddley diddley dee" whilst sprinkling a personal odour of cheese on his Calvin Kleins, and on this occasion, it would take a stone faced homme de miserable to disagree.

It's hard to define KaitO. Initially their post-punk disfunctionality has a ring of Elasticaism about it, but then Niki Colt's spasmodic yelps display a kind of Siouxsie Sioux panache, which is made even more dignified by the enamoured Slits-go-skating-on-cardboard montage of 'Try Me Out', and suddenly all thoughts incinuating a lonely heritage of farming and fertiliser disappear in an instant.

Punish The Atom and KaitO set the scene quite admirably, but then along came the headliners...