Gig review: The Horrors, ABC, Glasgow

“There’s a little group of you who are thinking about jumping around, aren’t there?” muttered the Horrors’ singer Faris Badwan. “Then please do come to the front and push the people who’re standing still out of the way. We’ll all be a lot happier.” Ouch, testy. But if things appeared unsatisfactory from the stage, from the audience’s point of view this was a great gig.

If ever there was a good excuse for bands basing their entire sound and aesthetic upon the pillaging of the past, the Horrors are it. Their days as a mob of baby-faced goth rockers are long gone, and in their place stands the group whose impressive third album, Skying, was NME’s best of the year – which is ironic, considering it sounds like a pick ’n’ mix alternative compilation of the years 1968 to 1990.

On stage here, their look was similarly retro-styled: a bit New York punk, a little London art student at a happening in the late ’60s, decidedly corrupt ’70s Flying Squad officer crossed with Heaven 17 member in the case of suave keyboard player Rhys Webb.

Musically, they mix the comfort of recognition with a well-worked streak of individualism, from Badwan’s baroque Bowie-in-Berlin vocal flourishes on Who Can Say to the entropic futurist disco of Scarlet Fields, slowed to an anaesthetised stumble. The energised rush of Endless Blue was perhaps the best excuse for that dancing Badwan had demanded, but in truth the Simple Minds-echoing grind of Still Life and extended space-rock explorations of Moving Further Away were best appreciated with nodding, rapt attention.

Rating: ****