A great deal of fuss has been made about London's Output label of late, with favourable comparisons to such venerable leftfield imprints as Factory, Warp and Mo'Wax. Certainly boss Trevor Jackson has been at the forefront of the current vogue for all things 1982, signing a string of electro and punk-funk acts.
On a weekend, therefore, this label showcase might have filled Canvas, but on a muggy Tuesday when the headliners don't appear until gone midnight, it's an industry crowd. Dance-music movers including Death in Vegas's Richard Fearless and U.N.K.L.E.'s James Lavelle rub shoulders with men in trucker's caps and post-ironic Van Halen T-shirts, confirming that Output may be more about style than substance.
That suspicion intensifies with recent signing Colder, whose linchpin, Marc Nguyen, is a Parisian graphic designer. The detailed production that makes his Again album so menacingly precise is lost in live translation, as one brutally repetitive bassline and electronic scree sounds much like the next.
The better songs recall art-punk provocateurs Suicide or early New Order, but instead of the former's dead-eyed psychosis or the latter's melodic grace, Colder offer nothing but blank, studied cool. Stony-faced behind thick sunglasses, Nguyen does not look like a man in the grip of existential panic. He looks like a man whose idea of psychological torment is trying to decide which terribly expensive pair of trousers to wear. The audience remain unmoved. Perhaps this is because they are fashionably hard to please, or perhaps it's just that Colder aren't a whole bunch of fun.
Liquid Liquid, however, are the real thing. Active in New York in the early 1980s, and only recently returned to the fray, the punk-funk they pioneered can be discerned in the likes of Radio 4 and the Rapture. Watching them, you grasp exactly what "punk-funk" means. Using three drum kits and a bass, the quartet generate a churning, clattering groove that is neurotically urgent.
Mustachioed frontman Salvatore Principato whoops, hisses, slurs and rants like a proto-Shaun Ryder and moves like a proto-Bez. Not a song goes past without a new variety of percussion, and you half expect him to brandish a washing-up liquid bottle full of uncooked beans. He appears to be having the time of his life, as do the crowd. As Liquid Liquid encore with the wonderful Cavern, whose unmistakable bassline formed the basis of Grandmaster Flash's White Lines (Don't Do It), they raise an uncomfortable question: when the originals are this good, who needs imitators?
