The House of Love's moment was brief, but they still won the long-term loyalty of, well, at least 400 people. That was the number of thirtysomethings shoehorned into this venue for their first major London show since Guy Chadwick and Terry Bickers put aside their differences and resurrected their 1980s indie outfit. And those 400 were, to use the parlance of that era, mad for it.

Mad - it should be clarified - in an unaggressive, no-you-first sort of way. There was gentle appreciation rather than celebration in the air, which, I suppose, befitted a group who played an entire show in semi-darkness. If the dimness was meant to prove the House of Love are about heads-down industry rather than showbiz, that would have been evident anyway from the long stretches where peak was built upon shimmery guitar peak to no particular end. For a band who were once the epitome of melodic conciseness, they certainly have discovered lengthy doodling.

Songs from their new album, Days Run Away, were full of such meandering: endless drifts of droney, dubby experimentalism that marked out the House's new patch as being somewhere between Spiritualized and Pink Floyd. That kind of thing, frankly, is outside their remit, or at least needs a few screws tightened before it is taken out in public again. The near-countryish Kind of Love was the best of the new bunch, but even this paled, as it was destined to, in comparison to their copper-bottom classics Christine and Love in a Car.

Bickers, the classically moody guitarist, was the main force, at the expense of the taciturn Chadwick, who registered zero on the charisma scale. It was Bickers who kick-started the gothically bleak Christine and put the feyness into Beatles and the Stones, making the reunited House of Love something of an army of one.