These days it isn't enough to be just another garage band, if The Strokes and The White Stripes in 2001 was a cultural year zero for a new generation of rock fans, now in 2004 music fans want something a bit more, y'know, different. While bands like Kaito, The Futureheads, Franz Ferdinand et al are scratching at the surface of a deep vein of possibility, here are three generations of noise merchants queuing up to show the new boys how it's done.

Big Picture are the weirdest band tonight, intent on squeezing the most eerie, unsettling noises possible out of their guitars as Phew, your scary primary school headmistress, chants her nonsensical vocals over the top and fiddles around with her little squiggly electronic noise box. Nevertheless it's never less than accessible and when they finally decide to punk it up, the musical skill on display is as staggering as it is thrilling.

It's a measure of how confident Wire must be about tonight that they allow themselves to be supported by possibly the best live band in the world. Melt-Banana are like an electronic laser-guided bowling ball crashing into a quivering huddle of two-bit garage bands. They make the kind of ferocious, explosive, sharp-as-cheesewire and twice as tight noise that Primal Scream would cream their pants if they could achieve one eighth of. But no fannying about with supermodels for them, vocalist Yasuko Onuki doesn't just eat supermodels for breakfast, she cracks open their heads with a spoon and uses ex-members of Morning Musume to dip. Rika, half the size of the bass guitar that she so lovingly mutilates, has talent to burn and intertwines deliciously with Ichiro Agata's riotous guitar thrash. They're a lightning squall of breakneck beats and deranged punk noise that swings apart and crashes together with surgical precision. Awesome.

If Wire are worried about following that, then Colin Newman, the best preserved and most lively of this particular gang of ageing punkers, isn't letting on. He dances onto the darkened stage shining a torch in the faces of the audience. He's watching you, you know, and you're watching him watching you. Such is the world which Wire inhabit circa 2004, and anyone who bought last year's blistering return to form; "Send", has probably already picked up on this particular leitmotif. The fact that a bunch of old men like Wire still have leitmotifs is a sign of their unceasing energy and creativity. So is the fact that they eschew "Pink Flag" era material for much of the show and so is the fact that this matters not one jot because, like a post-punk King Midas, everything they touch tonight turns to dynamite.

The withered Robert Gotobed pounds the kit like an angry crane, the imposing figure of Graham Lewis, Melt-Banana t-shirt clinging tightly to his sturdy chest, has a thundering presence on bass, and wallflower Bruce Gilbert, embarrassedly clinging to the corner of the stage with his back to the audience, wrings all manner of sounds from his guitar without seeming to move a muscle. "It's all in the art of stopping!" grins Newman as the rest of them screech to a halt around him and that is Wire's true art. None of their songs hangs around for a second longer than necessary and they stop and start with breathtaking efficiency.

When they return for their first encore they crack open the rusty old can that is "Pink Flag" and the thinning hairlines in the audience are on cloud nine. When the whole crowd sings along to "Lowdown", Newman seems genuinely surprised and delighted and they get dangerously close to playing an actual single when the rip through famous B-side "Ex Lion Tamer". The atmosphere by now is electric and they indulge the frenzied crowd with a second encore which sends the mercury blasting through the roof and makes big holes in the ozone layer. Probably. They were ahead of their time in 1977 but we'll catch up with them eventually. -Ian Martin, Mar.19.04