Ghost's singer and guitarist, Masaki Batoh, looks fantastic, a Japanese androgyne in lurid pink tie-dye. Revered by the head-nodding cognoscenti, Ghost pitch their stall somewhere between psychedelia, prog and the swirl of shoegazing. It is almost, as nay-sayers sometimes put it when faced with lengthy jams such as Hemicyclic Anthelion, as if punk never happened.

Certainly, Ghost seem entirely sincere in their endeavours, but it is hard to see them as anything but pastiche - especially live, where you can't escape the fact that this is boys-together rock noodling of the most self-indulgent kind. It's a pastiche, however, that attracts an elitist audience: you can't imagine this crowd going to see a Doors or Pink Floyd tribute show.

There is something less comfortable going on here, too. If Batoh and his five bandmates were not Japanese but German - or from, say, Reading - would anyone care? There's a kind of inverse racism, a patronising orientalism, at work here: look at the Japanese digesting western culture!

It's a shame, because Batoh coaxes some lovely noises from his guitar, especially during the encore, Feed. On record, too, the palette is broader. They play only one song, Motherly Bluster, from new album In Stormy Nights; it would have been a treat to hear the bonkers Wagner-meets-Bauhaus rolling stomp of Water Door Yellow Gate. Unfortunately, there is a suffocating sequence of macho riffs and plodding rock drumming to replace it. It's enough to make you want to go home and listen to X-Ray Spex, or the Slits, or any other outrageous girl group who, if this really was the dog-end of the 1970s, would be waiting around the corner with a glint in their eyes.