Bands generally break up then reform some years later to trot out the hits to fill up their pension funds, but Wire have never played this game. After becoming one of the most influential acts of the punk era with the albums Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154, they have ceased to operate twice, each hiatus (of five and eight years respectively) seeking to renew their creative edge.

Nostalgia is catered for obliquely - at one point they even hired a band to play Pink Flag in its entirety (complete with the exact pauses between songs) before their shows so they could get on with the more challenging job of unveiling new material.

This rare UK appearance is so typically Wire - previewing an album (Object 47) that isn't expected until at least July, and unveiling a major lineup change (Laika's guitarist Margaret Fielder McGinnis replacing founder member Bruce Gilbert) which few people seem to know had happened. With fans shouting for Kidney Bingos - an old song, not a medical complaint - the band pile relentlessly forward, realigning their trademarks (guitars buzzing like bees, repetition and Colin Newman's irritated whine) into a pulverising yet somehow sweet-centred racket, almost a cerebral reinvention of heavy metal.

Clad all in black - with Newman glancing at a laptop - the band look more like a terrorist cell than a veteran rock group, although influencing the likes of Franz Ferdinand and the Futureheads seems to have brought them a new young audience. Perhaps that's why they feel more comfortable with revisiting their past, trotting out oldies from 154's The 15th to Pink Flag's Lowdown in encore after encore, the last delivered in darkness after the lighting man seems to have packed up and gone home. It's a microcosm of a show that manages to be both entertaining and unsettling.