Music review: The Blue Aeroplanes

'This is not a nostalgia exercise,' glowered Gerard Langley. As far as we could tell he was glowering behind the sunglasses he wore throughout, a lone Blues Brother powered by mordant English wit and the propulsive affection of late '˜80s/early '˜90s indie fans for whom The Blue Aeroplanes' personal impact was in inverse proportion to their lack of fame.

The Blue Aeroplanes ****

Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh

The Bristolian group nearly made it big as a kind of West Country REM with 1990’s Swagger album, then faded from view along with its sales figures. Yet they never went away, and this month’s Welcome, Stranger! is their 14th record since 1984.

Fans have wavered slightly over its imperfect recreation of their heyday’s gliding jangle-pop and Langley’s perfectly acerbic lyricism, but most of the new songs played amid this first UK tour in a decade sounded great live, from the pop at hollow nostalgia of Elvis Festival to Nothing Will Ever Happen in the Future’s sinister aside that “the hordes are missing on the border / it’s time to get your house in order / or someone else is going to do it for you.”

Naturally, the nostalgia all came flooding out by the end. Joining Langley, his brother John and their still-feverish dancer Wojtek Dmochowski (here wearing a pro-Jeremy Corbyn T-shirt) were Chris Sharp, the owner of Bristol’s Fleece venue, and Chrissie Hynde soundalike Bec Jevons, and they delivered thunderous, jet-engine volume and an enthusiastically intricate fusion of indie-pop and post-punk through covers of Bob Dylan’s I Wanna Be Your Lover, Tom Verlaine’s Breakin’ in My Heart and their own Yr Own World, Jacket Hangs and …And Stones. To those packing this small room, they were all classics.