If your sole fleeting brush with low-grade infamy amounted to little more than a footnote in the more obscure annals of rock history, and that brush occurred before your support band tonight were even born, it might be wise to have a little bit of respect for any venue willing to host you, and any punters prepared to fork out a not inconsiderable sum of money to come and watch you relive that questionable flirtation with glory.

Alternatively, you could simply get so pissed you can barely stand up, never mind perform.

Zodiac Mindwarp – in real life, if he has one, otherwise known as Mark Manning – had already been removed from the venue earlier in the day for trying to vandalise the place and had apparently fallen asleep during the soundcheck. If he’d remained comatose, his performance tonight couldn’t have been much less entertaining. Here’s a man who made his reputation briefly in the mid-1980s as a rock iconoclast, a highly ironic subversion of rock-god posturing and the genre’s – at the time – sexism and general stupidity. Somewhere in the intervening years, Manning has clearly forgotten the punchline.

Backed by a drummer wearing a pair of shorts so garish and crotch-huggingly tight you almost start to regret eating dinner earlier, and a bassist surely taken on board for having the longest guitar ever constructed, Zodiac Mindwarp starts promisingly enough, a bombastic ‘High Priest Of Love’ cranked out as top volume, but that’s as good as it gets. He’s soon slurring nonsensically in between songs in a fake American accent that no longer seems to be intended as parody, no longer a crazy rock’n’roll preacher man, just a sad old drunk with a band incapable of playing in time or tune with each other.

I’d mention how bad the sound was too, although it clearly hasn’t affected tonight’s local support bands: Komrad, whose complex technical hardcore has previously drawn comparisons to Mr Bungle, Shellac and King Crimson and is occasionally as impenetrable as that suggests, but at its best veers closer to Dillinger Escape Plan’s screaming math-metal, and Desert Storm, whose Tom Waits-fronts-Black Sabbath all-out riffery is both cathartic and claustrophobic and continues to mark them out ahead of the local metal pack.

The fact that two unsigned local acts with barely five years experience between them can so categorically steal the show from a man whose entire musical career was based on the maxim of pure theatre merely confirms how far Zodiac Mindwarp has fallen. Still, the weather’s getting warmer so at least he’ll be more comfortable as he pisses the last few drops of his career away on a park bench somewhere.