A Friday night tryst in a concert hall with your first great love thirty years after the first encounter is an unsettling experience. Back then you could keep going all night. Pogoing that is. Now you have the advantage of being older and wiser (ish) as well as being more of a sophisticate. A dinner without potatoes is no longer unheard of.

Ahhh, Buzzcocks. I always preferred them to The Sex Pistols. Their dress sense was easier to understand and they looked like they bought their clothes into the sort of shop normal people would go into. Their first two albums had a beautiful pop aesthetic and they were among the few bands with the gumption to visit Belfast in the late 70’s.

They played the Shepherds Bush Empire as part of a tour in which they play Another Music In A Different Kitchen and Love Bites back to back and curiosity won out over a reluctance to go and see a night of nostalgia. The 21st century cultural counter-revolution means that the band who produced Spiral Scratch are obliged to perform in a venue which has had the name of a mobile phone company bolted onto the front of it as part of a marketing strategy. This was not how the future supposed to be.

Whatever else it was tonight’s set wasn’t nostalgia. It showcased two superb and underrated recordings which have a place at the top table of British music. Ever fallen in love? has been done to death but tonight it merged into the background of a catalogue of powerful tunes some of which despite not having heard in years I could remember as well as a nursery rhyme, songs like Lipstick and 16 again.

The band were not going through the motions. From the interplay between Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle you could see that they were having at least as much fun as the audience. If I can identify a champagne bottle at a distance – and I can – Diggle was enhancing his performance by swigging down Moet et Chandon during the set. Whether it tastes better from a pint glass is a question you’ll have to address to Steve. Though it didn’t do much to improve a truly awful singing voice it had some effect on him. During the final number he started swinging the microphone around causing Pete Shelley to look at him with an expression of concern only seen at funerals when the grandchild with ADHD and Tourette’s  has to put the wreath on granny’s coffin.

Pete Shelley’s stage persona seems to be heavily influenced by Les Dawson’s two northern women. Even while singing he often borrows some of their mannerisms and to good effect. It makes for an intimate and entertaining style.  Along with the rest of the band he ripped his way through the two albums that were their creative high watermark. For an encore they offered up some of the singles, which if they were released today, would blow away most of what passes for modern music. The poster for Razorlight outside the venue was a reminder of this.

Yes it was a trip to the musical museum but it was a fine way to spend an evening. When I first started listening to music like Buzzcocks we used to joke that we’d be sitting listening to it in the old people’s home. There’ll be much worse ways to spend my dotage.