Always turn up early for the supports. Otherwise you might miss stuff like Dirty Whites, who, while being deeply rubbish, have a singer who can conjure up deep, unintentional, spectacular bellylaughs. Conjure might be the right word, for while he looks like Ozzy Osbourne if he worked in I.T., the chap spends a lot of the gig twirling his clasped hands manically, like he’s trying to unleash doves from his sleeves, while simultaneously escaping from handcuffs. There’s also a mean display of hunched over hopping, with devil horns thrown at the floor. This is a very repressed singer, finding bursts of joy in very bland pub rock, and this review is dedicated to him.

It takes a few songs for Lovvers to put the boot up this sorry-arse crowd, but by the third or fourth number, a fuzzy and totally great cover of the Kinks’ ‘Till The End Of The Day’, the Nottingham band have loosened up enough to throw sarky poses and surreptitious bum squeezes into their dynamite garage. Last month in Cardiff, Lovvers played basically in the packed out crowd of the Buffalo Bar, and were stupidly good. This month, in front of a more paltry showing, the take off is slower but the result is largely the same: utterly fun and addictive detonations of noise pop, bodies pinging and bumping everywhere. Major league stuff.

Numbers for the over-excitable: Jay Reatard has released over 200 singles, which go for over £400 a pop on eBay, and he plays over 700 of them tonight. Numbers for the less excitable: there’s about forty fuckers in the venue. Heathen populace. Not that all this stops the Reatard (as I call him in my brain) letting up from attack mode: audience banter is screaming the name of the next song four milliseconds after the last one has finished, average song length is two minutes downhill. The bassist’s excellent rock shapes are in no way lessened by him looking a bit like Kevin Eldon in a massive frizzwig, while Jay yelps from beneath his own wall of hair. Musically it’s a relentless stream of angsty, backwoods, Buzzcocks buzzpop, with hooks enough for Velcro fields. They do ‘Screaming Hand’ and ‘Hammer I Miss You’. They don’t do ‘Night Of Broken Glass’. Bummer. These apples is stellar enough though.