Monkey Island’s gutter rockabilly anthem ‘Bring On The White Trash’ perfectly sums up tonight’s double bill of primal rock’n’roll noise. Spawned from that greasiest underground cell that worships at the altar of The Birthday Party and Elvis Presley, both they and tonight’s headliners Penthouse retain a more than admirable belief in the idea that rock music sounds best when stripped to its skeleton and pumped out with little regard for audience safety.

Monkey Island have the suits and the singing skinhead drummer, initially chugging bullishly through Fall and Whipping Boy-style territory with a dirty, sustained hound-dog groove, raking hot ashes to the surface on the more disjointed tracks before finally igniting for a final juggernaut rockabilly landslide that finishes with all three members doing semi-comic Ivor the Engine noises before imploding quite fantastically like The Stranglers being sucked into a supernova. Pretty much as it should always be.

That’s tame though compared to Penthouse, that ragged, slightly dangerous group of individuals who forever seem to have been on the point of total collapse as a unit, particularly since leaving Beggars Banquet last year.

They’re fronted by one Charlie Finke - imagine Elvis reincarnated as an arachnid Jimmy Pursey and fed crack for breakfast every day. Bit of a wild dog is Charlie. Thinks he’s Nick Cave circa-1979 and makes you realise just how un-rock’n’roll most so-called rock stars really are. For forty blood-spattered minutes he screams, howls and turns himself inside out as the band crank up a wired and vicious swamp blues storm that sounds like it just leaked out of Satan’s own moonshine distillery. Like Queen Adreena’s Katie Jane Garside, there are moments when you fear for Charlie’s safety as he contorts himself, ties himself up too tightly for comfort in microphone leads and spews his demons into the ether.

Apparently he went down to sell his soul to the devil at the crossroads, only the devil chickened out. Say it loud brothers and sisters: rock’n’roll! ROCK’N’ROLL! ROCK AND FUCKING ROLL!

Sue Foreman