Even the hype would have had trouble getting a ticket into this place tonight, but by now his dark work has been done, and he was probably off at thirty thousand feet working on his next move, leaving us to comb ourselves into a frenzy that peaks around 9.30, with the whole place convinced by a swathe of effusive - nah, hysterical - London reviews, that we were about to witness the second coming of Cobain, Lennon and Alex Chilton all in one. There is nothing quite like a good rumour.

Before that though, The Libertines, from east London, do well to surf on the clamour and buzz, and despite all the obvious Strokes comparisons, they wrangle out a cool set of staccato songs spawned from that 70s period when Richard Hell and the Voidoids morphed rockabilly into American garage punk and stormed the portals of CBGB’s. It’s tidy and tight, but you can never shake the feeling there’s an invisible sign above them saying Noo Yawk Bandwagon, which is a shame.

To be fair to The Vines also, I’m sure they could have done without some of the more glowing reviews, coming to the UK, as they have, for their first tour and getting instant “sold out” chaos everywhere, with just a couple of nifty singles and no album for us to hold up to the light.

Let’s get this straight, The Vines are not a life-changing or zeitgeist-defining experience. What you do get though, after you project your fleeting annoyance on their PR department, is a fine debut rock concert from a first rate, sometimes brilliant, four-piece Antipodean bar band. So let’s pack in touting frontman Craig Nicholls as a superstar, as his charisma and ego just aren’t up to it, and anyway Jack White has all the brooding cool locked up at his house. The Vines play very old school classic rock with a caustic, snarling new wave attitude. Seeded in Australia, and living the last six months in Los Angeles, they’ve picked up that LA sheen that sticks to everything like hairspray. Bap-faced and bedheaded, Nicholls has trawled a lifetime of Zeppelin, Nirvana, The Saints, Big Star, The Beatles and even AC/DC records into a finely paced and memorable batch of songs, ranging from the feral garage of `Highly Evolved’ and `Get Free’, each scoured with a paint stripping Black Francis yowl, through to the Kyuss-style stoner-rock of `Mary Jane’ and the magnificent `1969'. The much vaunted cover of Outkast’s `Ms. Jackson’ is quite frankly pointless, but they redeem themselves in the encore with `Factory’ a clever paean to the drudgery of working life.

I suspect NME is now feeling the effect of being consistently outsold by Kerrang! and some of this humbug is down to their hustling for renewed cred. But if you can put aside the depressing poster wars, what we can look forward to is a fantastic album that will sell by the container ship full, and I fancy I’ll be down on the quayside awaiting its arrival.

Paul Carrera