The leaden bluster of perennially fashionable new wave miserabilists, Joy Division, ebbs through HQ's PA system as Lloyd Cole slouches away from a flurried acoustic preamble to what will be a muscular, power-chord drenched, greatest-hits performance.
Cole's prickly love songs were always too soft-focused - too darned nice - to achieve the notoriety enjoyed by the coterie of post-punk art rockers which he cites as inspiration. As Sunday night's fumbling, derisive treatment of 1985's sub-Housemartin drive-time anthem Lost Weekend makes clear, he has long since resigned himself to mid-1980s footnote status.
Cole is pragmatic enough to realise that, despite the polite reception accorded to a smattering of new compositions, most of us are here for nostalgia. The mocking banter and arch mid-song grimaces may hint at a stifled muse, but there will be no damn-the-consequences re-invention tonight.
Instead we get all the old favourites. Jennifer She Said, Forest Fire, Perfect Skin are by turns sparkling and ungainly; pretty, awkward vignettes, strewn with a wry, keenly observed lyricism . Cole's new backing band, the Negatives play it fast and loose, fuzzing his intricate, heartfelt, love songs with irreverence.
Most of us have heard it all before but that's exactly the point. When he plunges into a surreal, sing-a-long cover of Cher's Believe it's hard to tell whether he's taking the mick or throwing in the towel.
It all chugs along pleasantly enough - sufficiently engaged to shed the cultivated shy-boy mannerisms, Cole makes for a magnetic front man - but, with the first tinges of career twilight strobing the horizon, such studied, unyielding competence is unlikely to win any converts.
