One of literature’s most misunderstood anti-heroes, Captain Nemo lived for noble purposes. He saw the evil in mankind and the destruction it couldn’t help itself from dealing upon the world and he chose to fight back. Sort of the prototype for Greenpeace direct action campaigners, but with a heavily armed futuristic submarine.

As such, Nemo is an appropriate name for tonight’s band. They are seeking to take pop back, not to a gentler age but to a wiser time in an attempt to finally drag its bloated corpse into the future. And they’ve got a heavily armed catalogue of super-cool influence to back them up.

As with the best of the later New Wave bands to whom they look for inspiration, Nemo rest their sound on a solid synthetic base but never let it totally dominate. Instead guitars and bass weave around the hum and crackle of digital technology so that songs like ‘Memory Box’, while on one level sounding like it’s been patched in from 1980, finally emerges from its time tunnel, as at home in the 21st Century as anywhere in time. The band themselves, forever contorting like robot puppets, look like the Thunderbirds getting the funk.

Pitched somewhere between Devo, New Order, The Red Guitars and OMD, Nemo are still one small ripple on a British underground pop scene that is pig sick of marketing over imagination every time. They’re part of a nebulous scene that has fallen beneath the radar of both the national music press and everyone other than the smallest of independent record labels. Their time may yet come though. Tonight in front of no more than a dozen people they ooze class. From such murky depths true pop anti-heroes can rise.

John Leeson