“You said it’s dangerous to be so intimate.”

So it would seem, only stripped of their favoured intimacy The Blood Brothers seem a lot less dangerous. Urgency dissipates into the vast space above us, and with it, the sugar-rush thrill of so many of these songs. That said, songs this strong – ‘Rats And Rats And Rats For Candy’, ‘Trash Flavored Trash’ – are potent lessons in avant-garde punk whatever the place of worship they’re delivered in; it’s undoubtedly an inherent snobbery on my part that prevents me having as much fun now as I did when these flailing figurines destroyed the Underworld not so many moons ago. Call me indier-than-thou, whatever, but the realisation of this band’s crossover potential is such to have me both balking with disgust and slamming and clapping with all the gusto of a square-eyed kid at cartoon time. It is both amazing and appalling; exciting and petrifying.

Early songs are delivered speedily, mostly culled from last year’s Crimes long player, but tonight’s set only burns itself onto the memory’s blank canvas when the title track of said album is butchered at its close into ‘Guitarmy’. The sudden buzz of not-so-long-ago nostalgia is such that fists fly upward across the entire audience. The party, dying? It’s only just begun.

‘Fucking’s Greatest Hits’ is a predictable mid-set highlight, but a wild run through of ‘Cecilia And The Silhouette Saloon’ and a debauched ‘The Salesman, Denver Max’ supersede its thunderous impact with ease. New single ‘Love Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreck’ closes proceedings before an audience of newly tuned in mesh-capped poseurs and longer-term aficionados with all the slithering beauty of a killer serpent, possessing every intention of squeezing you to death. It rasps with a menace unheard in so many ‘dangerous’ records, its lyrics dazzling and disturbingly graphic. It should go to Number One with a bullet the size of a basketball.

“They did all the things that you never said you wanted.”

True – I’d still take the smaller venue-packing Blood Brothers of yesteryear over their bigger-stage current day incarnation, but to begrudge a band full of such mischievous invention, of such true punk spirit, would be like taking paintbrushes away from a pre-teen Picasso. You can’t clip these wings, they’re simply too strong. Next stop, the ‘proper’ mainstream? If so you won’t catch me complaining, promise…

Photography by Stephanie Min (visit her website)