Donna Mathews is standing next to me, getting psyched to go onstage. Hang on a minute, this can't be right. Donna Mathews is a certified fuck-off famous Pop Star. She should be swanning around Soho or whatever certified fuck-off famous Pop Stars do, not standing next to me in a basement club on Oxford Street. See, Justine may have been the sexy, drop-dead gorgeous one in Elastica, but Donna was the cool one, the girl the boys wanted to sleep with, but the girls actually wanted to be.

As the arty, minimal funk of ESG oozes through the stereo, Donna's new band, Klang! take the stage, almost in homage. Klang! are arty, minimal post-punk, slinky, dark and brooding. The bass winds like a snake around the most stripped-down of drumbeats, as Donna's distinctive ping-pong guitar spurts out unexpected "Where the fuck did that come from?" melodies, mixing the pounding intensity of Krautrock with the playfulness of No-Wave. And oh, her dirty angel voice. It's good to have her back.

Echoboy have three different guitars, two vintage organs, a Leslie rotating speaker cabinet, banks of effects and a supporting cast of session players... and yet they sound like the IDM U2. You've got to be joking! Surely this is the wrong band. The Echoboy that I knew made gorgeously claustrophobic electronica. This is very slick and I'm sure that it will be a massive commercial crossover success but honestly! The only difference between this and, say Doves - or worse, Coldplay - is a slightly "edgier" sample track.

Boring classic rock affectations abound - Richard Warren actually yelps "You've lost your creativity" in an earnest tone Eddie Money would be ashamed of, as a stadium rock light show swirls around. Come off it! In the prog-rock stakes, this is STYX. They even manage to make the joyous, train-sample-driven "Turning On" - my favourite track off Volume 2 - sound like Girls freaking Aloud. There's a ballad with some neat glitchy samples but the session players seem to have the reverse Midas Touch - even cool crackly samples sound like crap when you're playing stadium rock over the top of it.

As the next song starts, my companion turns to me and whispers "Is this Immigrant Song by Zeppelin?" The strobes light up the looks of horror on our faces as we realise that it's not. We leave.