An all-girl Japanese rock'n'roll three-piece with immaculately teased beehives, 5.6.7.8s have been treading a fine line between gleeful irreverence and slavish fidelity since 1989. (When one lovely but ragged solo swerves woozily out of time, you're reminded how mild ineptness can be such an integral part of pastiche.) Recently, however, they've become "cool". Not as in actually cool, which quietly (or not so) they were all along, thank you, but "cool" as in deemed to be cool by arbiter of "cool" Quentin Tarantino, hence their appearance in Kill Bill.

Forget for a moment the palsied cast conferred by Tarantino's patronage, because it does 5.6.7.8s no favours. They are a perfectly good dance band, no more and no less, and it is only the attention now focused on them that points out their lack of real personality, which isn't in fact a lack but a default by-product of what they're actually very good at: recreating good old-fashioned 1950s rammalamma.

Tonight the 100 Club is packed with people straining to see the diminutive trio when there's very little to see because that isn't the point. There ought to be men and women with perfect quiffs and sprawling tattoos spinning each other round on a dancefloor; instead there are the blank faces of a crowd who've failed to keep up their side of a conversation.

There are two kinds of song: slow (Three Cool Cats, Dream Boy) and fast (the rest). They are all extremely brief (a recent compilation of singles crammed 27 songs onto a single CD). There is the slight sense, as often when Japan regurgitates Western forms in the most gaudily two-dimensional way, of the shrugging off of an infinitely older, more sophisticated culture for the simple joy of indulging in more primitive thrills. On the other hand, this is probably rather more conceptualising than those primitive thrills can bear.

5.6.7.8s aren't here to make you think, they're here to make you dance. Hopefully they'll soon go back to doing just that.