Friday 26/03/04 Bobby Conn & the Glass Gypsies, The Cribs @ Joseph's Well, Leeds

Traditionally, Wakefield’s most famous export has been rhubarb. The Cribs aren’t about to change that. The fraternal threesome play a series of choruses they’ve forgotten to write songs for, leaning heavily on that Strokes thing of playing one chord for ages - then throwing in a bit of jagged post-punk guitar for variation. There’s no sense of drive beyond a vague feeling that they thought it might be quite cool to be in a band, and their final number is terrible, a chronic misjudgement.

All of which makes Bobby Conn’s decision to champion The Cribs’ meagre talents totally inexplicable. One can only assume that it’s part of his wicked master-plan for world domination. From the opening sludgy glam metal riff of 'The Homeland' it’s clear that the diminutive Mr. Conn is some kind of evil genius. The man was born to play a Bond villain. In matching Hawaiian shirts and blue eye-shadow, it’s clear that his megalomania extends to his band, but they don’t seem to mind. Perhaps they share his warped, disfiguring outlook on the world. The music is a note-perfect pastiche of all that was bad about the seventies and eighties, from bubblegum glam metal to the worst excesses of disco. The ghosts of Gloria Gaynor and 10cc are invoked in a dark ceremony which might recall Beck’s 'Midnite Vultures'; were the sense of humour behind it not so jet-black and cruel.

Conn is the cancer at the heart of it all, pouring forth bile with a terrifying theatrical flourish. The way he raps his insidious falsetto around 'Home Sweet Home', the post-apocalyptic daydream of one of those American survivalist nutters, is both alluring and repulsive. "My favourite make-up is getting hard to find/but I don’t mind," he informs us. It doesn’t matter because his garage is filled with food and guns.

Elsewhere, he fantasises Elton John singing a song just for him at a party awash with "vomit and glitter". The mullets and Hoxton fins down the front are lapping it all up, even as he describes London’s "squalid paradise" of "pretty girls and boys with perfect hair". In Conn’s world the beautiful are ugly, and the ugly are uglier still. There is no redemption, no matter how much you thank Jesus. In answer, Conn has turned hatred and resentment into a hideously compelling artform. "Why mistrust our obvious success?" he says, with the contorted smile of a used car dealer, or war-mongering president.

Great music never sounded so wrong.