There was a triple frisson going to see this band which, since the unmourned demise of Selfish C#nt, are now the bearers of the rudest name in music. I was given a lifetime ban from Queen’s University Students’ Union one year after receiving honorary life membership and couldn’t be sure that I was still not on the bouncers’ watch list. The whole thing was a travesty of justice!! The union’s SDLP leadership fingered me for painting Trotskysist slogans along a corridor and this at a time when every wall in Belfast was decorated with “Viva Mandel” and “Forward to socialist revolution under the banner of the Fourth International”. These were the pre CCTV Pernod Years and my recollection is worse than fragmentary but no convincing evidence was put forward that it was not done by the agriculturalist Provisionals I was drinking with.

Then of course if you ever want to worry about people thinking you might be some sort of dirty old man return to a students’ union twenty something years after you left it. Though that wasn’t so bad after all.

Maybe last night’s show was not the future of music but it was very definitely one of the visionary musical side roads. The influential bands of 2030 will be inspired by this. If Radiohead were producing similar music it would be on sale in every supermarket in the country and critics would accuse them of becoming sellout popsters. For some reason you don’t get to hear Holy Fuck (HF) on the radio that much, probably down to poor management or something. Listen to the track Lovely Allen and you’ll agree. Better still go and buy the Young Turks album and play it loud.

The Toronto based band are an ecosocialist’s dream. They make their own instruments from discarded bits of electrical equipment and presumably the late start last night was to make sure that the building’s health and safety officer had gone home. There was one gizmo that looked like the machine my bus conductor uncle Barney used but instead of exciting rolls of paper this one used some sort of wire which the musician pulled through. God knows what it does but the sound is sensational. The humans make noises too but they use one of those crappy little mikes that cost a fiver and distort everything. Wonderful.

This, to my knowledge, is the band’s first European tour and they appear to be at that stage where they sleep in their van and don’t get a chance to wash too often but they were getting a real buzz from the performance. Electronic music at its best can play with sounds and frequencies like no other genre. At one point my trousers seemed to be vibrating, not on account of anything I was doing but because of the bass sounds. This was music as a physical experience and even if you are not of the dancing sort HF is a band whose lives shows will get you twitching.

Five out of five for this one.