Well, this was a stonker of a gig and no mistake. Although one act consisted of six or seven middle-aged blokes playing rambunctious trad jazz, and the other specialised in spooky synthesizer-based trip-hop, as the show unfolded, the synergies became obvious.

Vienna Ditto don’t take themselves awfully seriously (at one point singer Hattie Taylor posed and grinned while displaying a copy of the band’s fine Liar Liar EP in the style of a Play Your Cards Right dollybird), but pretty much everyone else does. They have enormous versatility, pouring those Bristol beats, Staple Singers-era holy blues, torch songs and even experimental noise into Nigel Firth’s little keyboard, and the result is a set that nobody wanted to end. Taylor as a frontperson is somewhat contradictory: she looks as if she belongs on the stage, but when called upon to talk to the audience often sounds hesitant and nervous. Of course, this tentativeness disappears when she starts to sing: her voice is full, rich and nuanced, perhaps the best in town. This set was bluesier than usual (no place for my beloved ‘Bells’, ‘Winter Time’ or ‘Snowbound’), with the Pulp Fiction-influenced ‘Long way Down’ a special treat. Firth is a splendid musician, running the electronica side while maintaining an intricate mesh of electric guitar fills, chords, runs and feedback at the same time. They should pay him double.

Following on, The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band was on majestic form, continuing their five year mission to get boys and girls half their age pogo-ing like bastards. There’s something rather poignant at the heart of this: men who love music from an era before even they were born have developed the knack of handing this gift on to the next generation, one for whom Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke must now be as remote as Alexander of Macedon or Thomas Aquinas.

It helps that they play wonderfully well: you can’t have seven or eight guys on stage unless they listen very carefully to each other (or are coached with an iron rod), and the horn section in particular is compelling. But the sidemen, such as their inscrutable guitarist, deserve plaudits too, because without their restraint there would be too much going on. It’s an irony that as Dionysian a band as this depends for its communicative power on some serious self-discipline. Another key strength of the band is their leering growler of a vocalist Stuart Macbeth, who probably writes the best lyrics in Oxford; his account of the old codger in ‘Grandpa’s Shed’, dying a delicious death by country cider and Fats Domino, is witty, playful and moving all at once. The good news is that the songs from their forthcoming album seem, on this hearing, to be the equal of those from their 2010 debut, Year Of The Rabbit, with ‘Birdman Of Barley Mow’ a potential standout.

So, two acts who sound very disparate both showed themselves to have a strong connection to the music of the past (recent and distant), but by using technology on the one hand and writing brilliant, relevant lyrics on the other, they both showed equally that they could make that past sing.