You’ve seen them, the government led campaigns to bring ‘those that can’ into teaching. On the billboards, bright-eyed bushy-tailed young-stars, gazing with adoration into their teachers eyes, or doubled up with hilarity at their classmate’s innocent and completely academic joke. Pushing aside the fact that a school classroom at three-o-clock on a Friday afternoon is full of children so lively you can almost hear them snoring, kids do have some one-ups on adults; not having a clue about mortality, an ability to create or disband make-believe worlds in an instant, and, when they aren’t bored to death, they are the polar opposite: powered by excitement. Before I wander off into a critique of the failings of education at large, I feel I should mention some musicians, bands that all played one after another in a single night. Bands that were linked together by their retention of (the more desirable) youthful traits.

For one, kids don’t worry about doing something without formal training; give them a recorder and they will squeak at top volume with no concerns. Give them a karaoke mic, the same happens. RachelAPP is over five foot tall, but yelps unhinged, preschool style. She plays guitar over drum machine and keeps on yelping, both bewildering and endearing. Maybe if she leapt around a little, wiggled her feet, maybe then she’d seem that bit more interesting, and maybe if I could tell one song from the next I could keep myself that bit more interested.

Dirty Whites are just that, dirty and white, and not at all bewildering – these are garage punks; nearly Husker Du vocals, thick Hammond organ, Dirtbombs style good-time melodies. Instead of swaggering into a tired-old garage rock hell hole, singer Neil is dancing, sweating, crashing with the other band members on the tiny stage. He spins round, snakelike arms sketching images in the air, falling off stage, falling to the ground, never missing a note. Even if this has made no steps for mankind into uncharted territories of experimental music, what children can also tell you is that simply having fun is sometimes enough.

The Girl From Headquarters like to combine the disparate; sparkly guitars, beards, secretarial dressing, casio abuse, maximum pitch screaming. They are making the wrong noises seem right, they are making drunk broken-heart ballads seem fun, and rock and roll seem horror b-movie menacing. Sometimes it’s nearly a little-miss-dramatic temper tantrum orchestrated – keyboards are slammed like percussion as band members let their vocal wrath missile directly at each other. Das Wanderlust, though, manage to be the very most fun of the whole evening; standing out partly as the only non-local band, they have travelled diagonally across the country, from the north-east to the south-west. They seem happy to be here in the land of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the music brimming over with glee. They dash from fluorescent pop to the noisiest thrashings of Bearsuit, to momentary glimpses of Trencher casiocore, but never dwelling too long. I imagine they load up on sugars, saccharine, a million e-prefixed food additives, before racing headlong through their set of songs. Even in these twenty-something year old bodies, with their twenty-something year old minds; the inner seven year old makes itself heard. With mischievous glances and high-pitched chattering, the stage has become the playground, or perhaps, the playground has become the stage. It’s all too brief. We all dance, at least one person goes wild. This grimy punk pub has become youth-pop classroom. Das Wanderlust, please come back soon.