I’m not sure what I do more often, vow to stop attending nostalgia shows or write up the nostalgia shows I’ve attended.

In the past week I’ve seen three bands, all of whom were at their creative peak in the 1990s. These bands fill venues of various sizes by playing songs from 30 years ago to people largely born in the 1970s and 1960s.

People like me.

Earlier this year I had a chat with the excellent standup comedian Athena Kugblenu in a crypt. [1]

She was of the opinion that she was performing a dying art form, and was diversifying her career accordingly.

“You get eighteen year olds, they have no idea what stand up is. How to behave at a show. What it’s supposed to be.”

“I don’t think it’ll be a thing in twenty years.” [2]

I’m not sure live much is on such a stark trajectory, but outside of Swiftian mega-gigs, and with grassroots venues still shutting at an extraordinary rate, it is hard to imagine where the future Neil Hannons or Sonya Madans will hone their craft, where they’ll learn how to play and how to perform.

And this might just be an outmoded, fortysomething way of looking at it anyway, just as writing a rambling blog post instead of posting a short video is a very outmoded way of communicating about it.

Perhaps bands playing live, as opposed to kids with laptops and backing loops trying to sing like Ed Sheeran on TikTok, is already quaint? We’re not quite in the realm of classical, keeping a dead art form alive as a form of class peacocking, but maybe we’re not as far away from it as we’d hope.

The Dome in Brighton was originally the stables for the Prince Regent, whose decadent Royal Pavillion sits nearby. A fitting venue for The Divine Comedy, with their silly songs about horses and occasional tendency towards the preposterous.

There’s always been so much more to Neil Hannon than the band’s most famous songs, which often are the most novelty, be they 1998’s National Express, or even My Lovely Horse, from Arthur Matthews’ beloved sitcom Father Ted. 

These songs helped pay the bills and keep the albums flowing, but they’re not even the best Divine Comedy songs about public transport or horses respectedly. [3]

Neil Hannon and his hired hands (there hasn’t been a band, as such, since 2001’s Regeneration) arrive on stage looking dapper as always, Hannon tiny and ageless under a trilby. They start with Achilles, the lead single off latest album – “our twenty millionth”, says Hannon from the stage – Rainy Sunday Afternoon.

This is the band’s best collection of songs in decades, the singer’s baritone still flawless but slightly heavier with age. It won’t in any way surprise regular listeners that there is a lot here that sounds like Scott Walker.

Hannon recently did a Hollywood soundtrack album for the latest Willy Wonka remake, which helped finance this album’s recording at Abbey Road and also – perhaps – siphoned off some of his more whimsical tendencies. Rainy Sunday Afternoon is a consistently meditative and melancholy beast, taking in big themes like dementia, ageing, and saying goodbye.

Of the three bands I saw this week, The Divine Comedy are the least focused on past glories. Their set is liberally peppered with new tunes, and their vast back catalogue is raided for some of their lesser heard, but thematically appropriate songs.

So we get When The Lights Go Out All Over Europe, Absent Friends, which makes me cry, and Generation Sex, with its increasingly prescient warning of a world driven dumb by race-to-the-bottom media, social or otherwise.

The encore begins with In Pursuit Of Happiness, the first track off Hannon’s masterpiece, A Short Album About Love. This still sounds extraordinary, despite the album version’s orchestra here by economic necessity recreated with a single fiddle, keys, and accordion.

It is revealing that Hannon seems least engaged when he runs through his give-them-what-they-want slew of pop bangers: Indie Disco, Something For The Weekend, Becoming More Like Alfie, the aforementioned National Express. He barely sings the choruses – the up-and-dancing middle aged audience do it for him, while he pulls from his half of Guinness.

I had no idea I was seeing Babybird. They were supporting Echobelly at Chalk, a show I’d agreed to go to last-minute with a Highchurches band mate in need of a dance. She correctly guessed that 90s guitar-pop was a better boogie option than folk at The Brunswick, or ex snooker player Steve Davis’ psychedelic analogue synth wig-out band upstairs at the Hope & Ruin. [4]

As we walked up the stairs to the venue, we heard ubiquitous, sour 90s Babybird hit “You’re Gorgeous”. Surely not? Yup, there he was – the unmistakable Stephen Jones, hair still spiky, accent still Sheffield, voice still impeccable.

“Your beach is still pebbly. The council need to sort that out.”

Jones is a one-off. Here accompanied by casio-style backing drums and a guitarist, his high croon sounds magnificent on If You’ll Be Mine, those sha la las soaring as always. He isn’t afraid to tell the crowd to shut up or fuck off to the bar if he plays a lesser-known tune, of which there are plenty: Babybird’s bandcamp consists of thousands of songs, many of them melodically creative and lyrically brutal tales of alcoholism, misogyny, and despair.

You get the sense of a man with songwriting as compulsion, an oddball whose songs wouldn’t get anywhere near the radio in today’s ultra-safe cultural climate.

The one sour note is when he mentioned Johnny Depp played guitar on one song from fifteen years ago – plenty before Depp revealed himself as a total shitbag, but the warmth of this dodgy celeb shout-out kills the mood, at least in our corner of the venue.

So far we’ve had a singer mildly irked he still has to play the hits, but still producing popular, critically acclaimed albums; and a bloke from Sheffield who will release songs regardless of whether anyone’s listening.

Finally, there’s Echobelly, and nostalgia in its purist form. There are no new songs, not even the tiniest bit of fakery about why most are here; to get drunk while singing along to songs from when we were young.

Full Disclosure: I never rated this band. In my head they were fourth tier Britpop, alongside maybe Menswe@r and These Animal Men. And, ahem, I always got them mixed up with Sleeper, hopefully more a comment on how male-dominated Britpop was, and how interchangeable some of the guitar riffs and choruses could sometimes feel.

Madan, though, is clearly a star. Sleeperblokes was always the condescending term for members of a female-fronted indie group, and unfortunately the non-Madan members of the band feel very Echoblokes, with the honourable exception of the bassist and his splendid moustache, the moustache of a mid-ranking 1980s official of some Ba’athist bureaucracy, who fancies himself as something special.

The hits reel themselves out, and my friend, who knows nothing of this world, dances along to Great Things without a care in the world, as we watch parents with grown-up sons all singing along. It’s sweet, earnest, and an escape from reality – and so who am I to complain, or even to suggest that there’s anything wrong with any of this? A pseud, that’s who.

The woman in front of me waves her arms for the fast songs – these all basically sound like Suede, but please don’t tell anybody – and hugs her partner for the slow ones. And as the lights go up and I sneak off for the cloakroom, I see she is reading the Echobelly Wikipedia page.

[1] The Museum of Comedy, a venue under a church near the British Museum

[2] Almost to prove my point, I met a 30 year old builder in the sauna earlier who thought heckling was the POINT of stand-up. When I explained 99.9% of comedians hate it, he was baffled. Thanks, Jimmy Carr and “watch this heckler get owned” social media videos!

[3] Europe by Train and The Dogs & Horses, for my money.

[4] Genuinely, this is a thing.