When these retro-rock Canadians last toured here, they were a much hotter prospect than their unknown support act, Franz Ferdinand. Fifteen months on, Hot Hot Heat still occupy roughly the same position - plying their synthy trade around the club circuit - while the Franz barely remember what it's like to play to fewer than 10,000 people.

If expectations are no longer quite so great, the high-velocity quartet can at least rely on the loyalty of people who remember their shining moment, the 2003 single Bandages. Enough do to make this one-off show a sell-out, and once in the presence of singer Steve Bays and his mushroom-cloud hair, you recall why Hot Hot Heat once seemed next in line for take-off.

One-dimensional in the most likable way, they make 1980s-derived new wave feel like an idea whose time has come. Which of course it has, over and over since the 1980s. Bays and his boys, though, have the tunes, the trousers and the high-caffeine thrust to carry off a whole evening of it. The evening actually clocks in at under an hour, which is just about perfect - it's 10 quick songs and, as they say goodnight after a gambol through Bandages, they haven't spilled over from bootylicious to boring. Forty-five minutes is just long enough to get revved up to the wiry pop of their first album, Make Up the Breakdown, and a preview of the forthcoming second, Elevator. It offers plenty of time, too, to be impressed by Bays's trick of holding the microphone in one hand and producing keyboard squiggles with the other.

If Bays could grow some charisma to accompany the towering nimbus on his head ("Big hair!" someone screams admiringly) and the glottal-stopped yelp of a voice, he'd be star material. Regrettably, he's more absorbed in pulling off one-handed glissandos in Ladies and Gentlemen and creating pitch-perfect Merseybeat vocal harmonies on Dirty Mouth.

Well, somebody's got to do it - and maybe this year they'll be second-time lucky.