If the Dandy Warhols could bottle their hipster appeal they would surely make millions. Or at least considerably more than they do from album sales these days. Briefly big in Britain and beyond in the early Noughties, the Portland, Oregon-based band have since dropped right off the pop radar, not to mention parted ways with their label. Yet the Empire was full of fashionably dressed young fans who squealed with delight at the start of every song.

The band, meanwhile, showed little emotion. Lined up along the front of the stage so that the handsome singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor had no more spotlight than the other three members – indeed, the dextrous frizzy-haired, moustachioed drummer Eric Hedford, nestled next to him, was often more entertaining to watch – they rarely spoke and seldom smiled.

For most of the night, the Dandy Warhols were bathed in gloomy light and a shroud of dry ice, which added atmosphere to the set openers Mohammed and Godless, both murky, melodic, Velvet Underground-inspired songs from the eight-year-old album Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia. But the gloom suited neither the uptempo old hit We Used To Be Friends nor the brand new number Welcome to the Third World, a fun, frisky, Blondie-esque pop song on which Taylor-Taylor growled cool cat lyrics as different characters.

Other tracks from their forthcoming (fifth) album Earth to the Dandy Warhols were equally intriguing, notably Now You Love Me, a space rocker performed with no guitar or bass and on which Taylor-Taylor played percussion. Yet the set was persistently hit-and-miss. The passionately played highlights were Bohemian Like You, the band’s best-known song, thanks to its use in a phone advertisement, and the swaggering hip-wiggler Get Off, which incited the night’s loudest singlaong.

But they were bookended by two surefire stinkers. All the Money or the Simple Life Honey aimed at ramshackle early Rolling Stones but sounded like poor man’s Primal Scream, while Taylor-Taylor’s vocals on You Came In Burned, delivered solo on acoustic guitar, were so howlingly out of tune he’d have been booted offstage in a karaoke bar.

Still, he would be destined to leave with a good-looking girl. Even in an outfit of tight trousers, buttoned-up shirt and braces the lanky, long-haired singer oozed cool. For the sake of selling out shows, he had better hope he never gets fat.

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