In 1990, the Blue Aeroplanes were a cult bag with an acclaimed album, Swagger. And for the past 16 years that's how they've stayed. Now, seizing on the vogue for live re-creations of career highpoints, charismatic bedsit poet Gerard Langley has assembled members of various incarnations of the band to celebrate the re-release of Swagger and new album Altitude.

Swagger plucked the Blue Aeroplanes from the fringes of an indie scene they had haunted since 1983. A noisy jumble of soft rock riffs, skulking blues and jangly Merseybeat - with Michael Stipe's backing vocals bolstering Langley's spoken word, stream of consciousness - the album's confidence was all the more staggering for being so out of step; Madchester was blooming but the Blue Aeroplanes wanted to be the Velvet Underground.

"Well, you know how it starts," states Langley dryly. Dressed in a dark suit and dark glasses, he's a fey elder statesman of rock, especially alongside Wotjtek Dmochowski. Wearing a white and yellow shirt decorated by, you've guessed it, swooping blue planes, the first note of Jacket Hangs sends Dmochowski - the Bez of the band, before there was a Bez - into what at first appears to be painful involuntary spasms but later become a slow motion ballet that interprets the grace of the saxophone and mandolin.

Dmochowski's energy is fuelled by the joy in the songs. The fragile beauty of Weightless, which has Langley sermonising about satellites, is accompanied by a rush of crashing guitars. The Applicant gives Sylvia Plath's poem a life-affirming invincibility and inspires Dmochowski to swing from the ceiling with such force that the previously moshing crowd below him scatter.

Years spent in pop's wilderness mean the band aren't as tight as they could be, but as they play a version of Tom Verlaine's Breaking My Heart with carnival spirit, everyone's too busy dancing to complain.