The Workhouse have one guitarist with a substantial beard and another who looks like Vinnie Jones’ bigger, more brutal brother; their name suggests something altogether grim, grey and unrelenting. The reality of their music, though, is a world away from those first impressions. The Workhouse sound like a band completely out of time; as if they’ve been plucked from some point twenty years in the past or twenty years in the future and put back into the time stream at that point where they could cause the most confusion and excitement. They sound like the coolest band on the planet, capable of moments of quite staggering beauty, like forthcoming single ‘Stoichkov’, where a searing intensity belies their softness of touch, or to put blunt comparisons on it, they are the point where The God Machine meets The Cocteau Twins. A guitar band with a difference - a band who really could make a difference.

Paper Sun are nothing like as precious, preferring as they do, to spray their easy, catchy pop melodies with a solid dose of rock. So they’ve got Mick Ronson’s guitar licks and Liam Gallagher’s swagger and a wall-of-sound approach that stretches from The Beatles to Talk Talk. ‘Insane’, meanwhile, captures a spirit of nouveau-gothic pop where singer Gavin howls enigmatically over the band’s arppegiating powerchords. It’s quite simply great pop music in the way that you can never properly explain. Maybe it shouldn’t all fit together so perfectly, but the fact is, it does.

Vigilance Black Special, too, mine a rich vein of urban gothic. Their debut single, ‘We’rewolves’, released earlier this year, harked back to Scott Walker’s doom-laden operatics, but it’s ‘Don’t Chase Your Demons’ that tonight demonstrates why Vigilance have got certain people round these quarters all in a tizzy. Sprawling, cleverly understated but possessed of a pure pop power, it’s a tentative step into Nick Cave’s land of blues, not yet prepared to lose itself in religious freakery, still holding onto Dusty Springfield’s hand.

Singer Adam Clayton manages to be both nonchalant and intense simultaneously, while the band are equal parts portentous, pretentious and pure pop. Sometimes tonight their set tends to wander, not quite as focussed as their epic Zodiac set back in May, but always beneath the surface is the promise that some day in the not too distant future Vigilance Black Special might join the elite of Oxford pop.

Victoria Waterfield