London Brixton Academy

This is the all-nighter that this NME hack gets his Prml Scrm aural cherry popped, so he's been taken in hand by a shake, rattle and roll-scarred veteran - part of the Primal Tribe who've followed Bombin' Bob on every step of his hop, skip and holler into the heart of rock'n'roll darkness.

And the fact that so much of that journey has been spent floundering around in half-arsed chemical cul-de-sacs isn't mentioned. And that's because of 'Exterminator'. It's a killer album; a breathless sprint through a thousand interlinked cyberpunk'n'electro-hippy websites couched in the language of Paris '68 and the Sex Pistols. The soon-come May2K anti-capitalist carnival soundtrack, maaaan. It's the zeitgeist, baby - a blindingly brilliant record and anyone incapable of recognising that fact should get the fuck out of rock'n'roll.

But first, packed like cattle, we suffer the sheer tedium of Death In Vegas. Are they a rock band? No. Ah, right, so they're an exciting, genre redefining, wilfully transgressive mutant-mongrel experimental leap into an exciting musical future? Like fuck. They're stood stock still in the semi-darkness, and they drone. We got an amusingly bouncy 'Dirt' after three quarters of an hour of lower-back pain noise followed by what can only be described as "some more wank". Death In Vegas 'live' are, in fact, the world's shittest mobile disco. Period.

"Something something something and it wuz fulla hippies!" says Bob. Cue the killer intro riff from 'Kill All Hippies' and we are blinded by the lights and, seized by Quatermass And The Pit-style mob frenzy; dragged screaming and kicking to the gates of very rock'n'roll heaven. 'Exterminator' rocked too. As did 'Rocks'. But, bugger me backwards, did we have to tolerate a load of the ballsachingly crap old bollocks as well? Purge, Bob, purge! Year zero your back catalogue of its acres of dead wood NOW!

But Bob's deaf to our grumbling. This shindig is solely for the Primal Tribe inner-circle. Old shit they want. Old shit they get. And when relatively recently recruited bassist Mani (formerly of the same dodgy bunch of chancers that gave us the shit-awful Ian Brown, apparently) elbows Bob off the mic for some witty (and rather more intelligible) repartee of his own, my guide to this weird and wonderful world whispers in my ear that she and her fellow members of the 'inner circle' suspect that Manc moptop is trying to "take over" the Scream.

Uh, yeah. Like anybody gives a fuck. Tonight, was too much a parochial celebration of a patchy past, too little a launch-pad into a potentially glorious future. Bobby's punk rock'n'roll vision combined with the sad fact all obvious competition has imploded in the last 12 months, means that the Scream could conquer the world with ease. I mean, come on, post-Manics, post-Oasis, how hard can that be?

But hey, Babblin' Bob, a word to the wise - exterminate your OWN hippies first, maaaaaan!