Red Hot Chili Peppers and New Order

Forget Jack Lemon and Walter Mathau. If they ever make another Grumpy Old Men film, they should have Pete Hook and Barney Sumner as the co-stars.

“That’s a song most of you probably haven’t heard before,” Sumner tells the crowd, average age 18 and mostly unaware that the geezers on stage used to be in some band called Joy Division.

‘She’s Lost Control’ is one of four pre-New Order songs that get an airing tonight. John Frusciante joins them for ‘Transmission’, ‘Atmosphere’ is eerily reminiscent of Ian Curtis and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is played at twice the normal speed and punctuated at regular intervals by Hook’s exhortations for everybody to “C’mon! C’mon!” Bizarre.

The nu-metal hordes might not give a flying fuck about New Order, but middle-aged eyes go misty every time there’s a big screen close-up of Hooky and that unfeasibly low-slung bass of his.

Which, you’ll be pleased to hear, still sounds like a Panzer division trundling into the Sudetenland.

“Fuck off, you fat twat,” the plankspanker in question growls when a multipierced punter flips him the bird.

Not to be outdone, Barney intros ‘Blue Monday’ with a cheery, “Hope you enjoy this one…’cause we’re fucking sick of it.”

Other highlights include ‘Temptation’, ‘True Faith’ and the glorious sunburst of noise that is ‘Crystal’. Don’t leave it so long next time, lads.

They’re not going to beat New Order in the acerbity department but Anthony Kiedis’ “Don’t ask what you can do for yourself, ask what you can do for your audience” sums the Chili Peppers ethos up perfectly.

Tireless crowdpleasers, the Californians have enough quality songs in their arsenal to toss ‘Scar Tissue’ and ‘The Other Side’ away in the first quarter-of-an-hour. Looking like a Stars In Their Eyes version of Iggy Pop – a good thing in my book – Kiedis manages to stay perfectly in tune while running round the stage like a stuck pig. The man is simply incapable of standing still, which is exactly what you want when there are 40,000 people to be transported to rock ’n’ roll nirvana.

They nearly get there with the triple-whammy of ‘Parallel Universe’, ‘Could’ve Lied’ and a Frusciante-crooned cover of Sweet’s ‘Fox On The Run’, but then things go curiously flat.

Maybe it’s the unfamiliarity of the new songs that are tossed in, but the crowd become noticeably less animated as the gig enters the home-straight. Which isn’t to say that ‘Me & My Friends’ and ‘Californication’ aren’t things of enormous bass-slapping beauty. ‘Cos they are.

Encore time and Kiedis walks back on. On his hands, the über-fit bastard! There’s only tune they can possibly finish with and, yup, every larynx in the gaff gets a work out as Kiedis intones: “Sometimes I feel like I don’t have a partner/Sometimes I feel like my only friend is the city I live in/The city of angels, lonely as I am.”

Despite All Saints’ attempts to neuter it, ‘Under The Bridge’ remains that rarest of beasts – a ballad which genuinely tears at your heart.

No knock-out punch then, but in the end a more than acceptable points victory.