The not-quite-terminal decline of the super club has done wonders for the clubbing experience, if this lavish, Smirnoff-sponsored event is anything to go by.

Perhaps it’s just that the ltd press pass gets you into a swanky VIP lounge with free cocktails and snacks so minute as to be utterly void of calories but, is it me, or didn’t the door staff at clubs used to be bastards? Not any more, apparently. Now they’re as smiley as Mormon missionaries, but much less creepy. It was almost a pleasure to have to wait until 1.00am to see the Pet Shop Boys.

Both acts on the bill were in their natural element here - the high-energy dance club - and Matter is quite a club.
Little Boots’s throaty basslines and bleepy electronica sounded pleasantly vapid at Glastonbury, but hugely energetic here, her spangly cocktail dress and vertiginous heels entirely appropriate to a welly-less environment. ‘Remedy’ is the obvious highlight.

The PSBs, knowing a well lubricated up-for-it club crowd when they see one, wisely avoid those swooning paeans to suburban disaffection, those brittle and brilliant stories of lost hope and lost love that they do better than any other band of the last 20 years. Instead they let rip with a high-octane, high-camp medley of guaranteed winners - ‘Closer to Heaven’, ‘Left To My Own Devices’, ‘Always On My Mind’ - before closing with the inevitable ‘West End Girls’.

We were even ‘treated’ to a Chris Lowe dance routine during ‘Why Don’t We Live Together’, although the duo’s brilliant quartet of backing singers/dancers won’t be losing any sleep. Well judged and great fun.

Richard Hodkinson