You know in Primary school they say that if you mix all the colours up you get white – and then you try it and you get a disappointing sludge? Well, Alys in Wonderland are the musical opposite of that. They take a wide-ranging selection of musical styles (experimental, rock, riffs that verge on metal, samples of voice and noise…) mix them together on guitars, drums and keyboards… and produce something which works. They then proceed to fire it non-stop at an often rather dumbfounded-looking audience while swigging milk straight from the carton and wailing into the mic about nuclear warheads aimed at someone’s garden shed. On nights when I’m not in the mood for it then it doesn’t engage me because it’s not easy to listen to, but even then the perversity of someone getting onstage and doing this in a small town pub back room is admirable. The sound kinda rises and falls, all the instruments will merge into a wall-of-noise type thing for a while and then suddenly cut to make way for a sample of a trumpet playing something incongruously perky or Imagine mixing into Wonderwall. It’s utterly perverse and ridiculous. Hurrah! I love the fact that this band exist. Long may they continue to perplex those who have come to stand at the back of the room until the headline act are on.

And then Donderevo, who are also big on keyboard-noises but use them in a far more poppy, synthesiser way over a base of rock tunes which often fail to go the way you expect them to. Very danceable stuff indeed, though not a mosh-pit band. Except for their last and utterly inexplicable song – when you have a set of above-average fun weird pop music, why bung a verging-on-nu-metal heap of mulch at the end? It’s just not right, dammit, especially not as a set-closer and especially when it keeps pretending it’s going to explode into something decent and then returns to the extricable chorus. Gah. It makes no sense anyway to have people leave the set humming something which sounds nothing like the rest of your songs. But anyway, that one blip aside, these guys are very much worth seeing. And they’re good performers as well, with stage presence and humour plus the marvellous sight of the keyboardist wrenching his instrument from the stand to the floor and doing poorly-balanced handstands on the keys. Go, see them, smile, dance, clap loudly, then leave when they announce their last song.

Antihero headlined this gig, but as it’s poor reviewing etiquette to cover the same band twice in a month I refer all interested readers here for the verbal equivalent of speechless awe - if such an oxymoron be possible.