What is psychedelia? My somewhat reductive answer is that it is four or five blokes in beards standing around playing the same chord for twenty five minutes. However, Gappy Tooth Industries oddly shoehorn Bristol’s winning three-piece Schnauser into the genre, despite the fact that their act is cerebral, satirical (with songs celebrating the charms of Westward Ho! and Noel Edmonds among others) and terse, none of which is usually associated with practitioners of the art of Jerry Garcia, Phish etc. Still, it’s a good show whatever it is, with all three musicians exuding effortless excellence. Guitarist and vocalist Alan Strawbridge is the focal point, a brilliant, inventive player and an equally clever writer. Actually this cleverness will not be to everyone’s taste: the songs are a bit too glitchy and unsettled for mine. There’s so much restless chopping and changing of times and feels, that one is left with the impression that the band has a short attention span at best and are overly facile, superficial japesters at worst (they have a song called ‘I Wuv You, Mommy’). Still, great bands have faults that lesser bands don’t have room for, and Schnauser are a great band.

Strawbridge then proved equally adept when playing drums for Anton Barbeau, with McIntosh continuing on bass. The collective is known as Dog Party, although many of the songs will be familiar to fans of Anton’s solo act. Last time I heard Barbeau backed by a group, he achieved the astonishing feat of turning Stornoway, the best band in Oxford, into sludgy, stodgy chord sheet-reading third-raters, but Dog Party, no doubt benefiting from some serious rehearsal, were hard-wired into Anton’s antic disposition, and gave thrilling impetus to previously laid-back hippie musings such as ‘You Can Move a Mountain’ and ‘Drug Free’. I loved Holly’s sense of benign perplexity at Anton’s freestyle ramblings- it was as if we were watching a saintly schoolteacher coaxing a gifted but hyperactive pupil away from the box of matches and the can of petrol.

Rounding things off in style were precocious heavy rockers Dial F for Frankenstein. They purvey pretty uncompromising, riff-based rock with more than a nod to The Foo Fighters, especially in the singer’s gravelly, Grohlish growl. Behind him there is all sorts going on, with the bassist in particular a study in whirring hands on the fretboard and ceaseless industry. There may not be sufficient quality tunes yet to fight the Foos for the post-grunge crown, but give ’em a couple of years. They could be contenders.