For most of the last decade Andrew Weatherall was one of dance culture's prime movers. He produced Primal Scream's hallowed Screamadelica and lived it large as one of the first "superstar DJs". Suddenly though, the former punk rocker walked away, getting himself fired from his radio show, cancelling all his lucrative remixes and going to live in an isolated cottage.

Six years on, his band Two Lone Swordsmen are developing the music Weatherall loved before he became famous - PiL's metallic dub, Joy Division's poignancy and Adrian Sherwood's juddering mixes.

The Swordsmen may have begun life in the studio as an electronic duo, but here they are making their live debut as a five-piece band. They cheerily invade a Saturday night DJ set with Keith Tenniswood's snaking guitar lines, odd-looking band members with names like Lung and Rotter, and inimitable clanging menace.

Yet Weatherall's strained but lingering relationship with dance culture ensures that however dark TLS sound, their rhythms could start an aerobics class in a graveyard. The audience gradually divides between those edging nervously away, and those undergoing a religious experience.

For someone who has spent so long in studios and DJ booths, Weatherall is acutely charismatic. Wearing a black cowboy shirt and austere 1940s haircut, he hangs over the microphone and sings, eyes closed, like Ian Curtis.

The lingering effects of his brush with the superstar world should not be underestimated: he introduces new single Showbiz Shotguns as being about "celebrity gangsters". Elsewhere, Sick When We Kiss is twisted pop; Faux twists around the repeated mantra "Sinful rhythms..." and a rampaging version of the Gun Club's Sex Beat remodels preconceptions of what dance music can be.

Weatherall may have thrown it all away, but he has gained something else entirely.

· At Sankeys Soap, Manchester, on Friday. Box office: 0871 910 5200. Then touring.