In 1971, when Alan Vega and Martin Rev first started making music, it was deprivation that made them what they were: lack of instruments gave them their stripped-down sound, while lack of beds and hot dinners provided their icy edge. The pair may have had a square meal or two since then, but their drum machine still sounds tinny and cheap.

Luckily for Suicide, it's as easy to be disaffected when you're 60 as when you're young. Whether it's as much fun is another matter. Rev, the keyboard player, is responsible for the band's cold three-note rhythms; tonight he livens up the job by slamming out harsh electronic discords, plucking up his wrists after each stroke like an evil count at the castle harpsichord. He also likes to drag one hand along the keyboard in a howling glissando. It's a good effect, but when Rev has done it on seven tracks in a row, you start to wonder if he isn't a bit of a one-trick punk.

Vega, meanwhile, dishes up his trademark vocal mix of Ian Curtis, Elvis and a wolf with a cold. His energy level is low, although he tries to work us into a frenzy with a call to arms: "Boycott every fuckin' industry that's in Iraq! ... Corporations! ... Oil! ... War!" Given such political awareness, it's too bad he didn't make more of delivering to a UK audience the ballad Cheree.

That song, one of Suicide's early-1970s efforts, stands out as mercifully short and sweet in comparison with the turgid six-minute jams of the band's 2002 album, American Supreme. But it's good to see that Vega and Rev have some surprises left. They come back for a second encore with Frankie, their multiple-murder epic. But tonight, the creepy howls of Frankie's dying wife and child are replaced with bathos: "Oh no ... oh no!" yowls Vega. The song saw them bottled off stage in Belgium in 1978, but here it angers no one other than the management, who had already put up the house lights - perhaps as a hint.