Like the other couples and ex-couples currently plying their lo-fi trade - the White Stripes, Kills - Joy Zipper's Tabitha Tindale and Vinny Cafiso are nocturnal creatures who probably only see daylight when they're going to bed. Let their stoops and rock'n'roll pallors be a lesson in the dangers of Vitamin D deficiency - even if, after 10 years as a Zipper, Tindale has preserved a measure of blond cheerleader sweetness. This one-off show is conducted with minimum physical effort - she sings, blearily, and prods a keyboard; he produces jarring guitar twiddles with a waft of the fingertips.
On their albums, Joy Zipper are adept at what you might call dissonant prettiness - but they struggle to translate it to live performance. They reproduce tracks faithfully enough, but 10 years' association hasn't bestowed charisma, or made them compelling to watch. They're clearly too comfy with each other to generate sparks, yet, perversely, lack the musical cohesion that could take the show to out-there places. They're just not cool - a fatal flaw when playing drone-rock whose effect relies on a band's exuding exactly the right proportions of hauteur and wooziness. Cafiso and Tindale have the wooze factor nailed - she actually seems to be fighting off sleep as she swoons out her fragile harmonies. But without complementary star quality, you may as well be listening to them on your CD player.
That said, the old tune Drugs benefits from an unexpected vaudeville-style reworking, and had we not been here we wouldn't have learned that Cafiso wrote the candyfloss-cute Valley Stream as a "suicide pact". We also wouldn't have witnessed the restrained album track Go Tell the World blossom into a bouncing clapalong that sounded like S Club 7 at their best. Sad to say, S Club could've taught these two something about presence.