Some musical genres just don't age well. Madchester's merging of indie-rock guitar riffs and acid-house dance rhythms may have appeared ground-breaking 20 years ago, but today it just sounds irredeemably quaint.

These diminishing returns have not prevented the Charlatans from playing a short series of gigs to mark the 20th anniversary of the release of Some Friendly, their debut album that topped the chart at the commercial peak of baggy rock. Sadly, tonight's show re-emphasises that if Madchester was always musically limited, the Charlatans were more limited than most.

Lacking the sublime melodicism of the Stone Roses and the maverick brilliance of Happy Mondays, the Charlatans were a more workmanlike concern, rooted in the rhythms of 1960s UK R&B, rather than late 80s narcotic hedonism. Hearing Some Friendly's tracks again, you realise how much of the album was unadventurous filler.

Tracks such as White Shirt and Opportunity are not so much songs as grooves, knotted swathes of Hammond organ, wah-wah guitar and shuffling drums over which singer Tim Burgess ladles his earnest drone. He dedicates Way Up There to the band's keyboardist, Rob Collins, who died in 1996, but as with most of the set, it sounds like a Stone Roses song for which the Roses had neglected to write a chorus.

Burgess has marked the occasion by regrowing his vintage bowl-cut hairdo, and looks far better than is feasible for a man of 43, but a dreary, meandering set is lifted only by the powerhouse throb of their 1990 breakthrough single, The Only One I Know. As the Charlatans plod through the leaden psychedelia of their traditional set-closer, Sproston Green, it's clear that this was one period piece that was not worthy of a revisit.