There could be few stranger places for LA’s Black Rebel Motorcycle Club to play a secret warm-up gig (very secret in fact with the promoter only tipping people off about its happening a couple of hours before stage time). This is the band’s first ever European appearance. Tonight is the Zodiac’s weekly student piss-up and shag fest, Fuzzy Ducks, exactly the sort of Bacardi Breezer-sodden orgy that gives students a bad name (mostly in the Daily Mail recently). There are gaggles of them dressed in nurses uniforms tonight for some reason. There they are at the back, gawping in a mixture of incredulity and sheer terror at the smouldering storm on stage.

At least tonight the weight of all that expectation can’t crush the band and it’s a good chance to blood stand-in former Verve drummer Pete Salisbury (regular stickman Nick Jago can’t get into the country). It’s apparent from the opening number, ‘Love Burns’, that much of what you’ve heard or read about BRMC is true, and more. You can almost taste the dirt that clings to their spidery, gothic mantras, mixing with the smell of the stage smoke that shrouds guitarist Peter Hayes and bassist Robert Turner, reducing them to mere silhouettes and compounding the sullen majesty of it all.

There’s no escaping the fact that, bar a few nods to The Stooges, they owe everything to the cream of the UK’s late-80s/early 90s underground rock. ‘Red Eyes and Tears’ spirals evilly like Spacemen 3, while ‘Whatever Happened To My Rock’n’Roll (Punk Song)’ is everything The Verve once were when they were simply Verve and still knew how to kick up dust. Elsewhere there’s the nonchalant swagger of pre-fame Oasis (‘White Palms’) and the sound of Ride’s pretty melodies being shredded by a pack of wild dogs on ‘Awake’. Add copious amounts of ‘Darklands’-era Jesus and Mary Chain and spot of Suzie Quatro (it’s true!) and it’s all a bit of an indie retro wet dream.

Tonight’s gig is a run through of the new album and you feel that in lesser hands it could all sound like mere tribute band fodder. It’s BRMC’s repressed fury and considered raggedness, the delicate balance of being in control of the noise (and tonight it is VERY noisy) that surrounds them and on the verge of losing it, that proves to be the winning formula though. Everything’s perfectly placed but still played with the air of a first gig so that it sounds completely and utterly alive.

Apart from the confused and disinterested Fuzzy Ducks crowd there are a few old cynics in the crowd, proclaiming they’ve heard it all before and they’ve got a point, but BRMC, like White Stripes before them, can sound like something new if only you’re prepared to keep an open mind. Tonight’s showing suggests they’ll be opening many more this year.

Dale Kattack