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Cinerama and The Wedding Present at Picturedrome, Holmfirth

Holmfirth's Picturedrome - a fine venue let it be said - seems to fit The Wedding Present as much as any venue can. Like singer David Gedge the location is stuck between Yorkshire and Lancashire and while it has ideas of modernity with Tapas and a refined bar it is still the place of Sid's Cafe and the last of The Last of the Summer Wine.

If not a man out of time Gedge is something of a throwback to an age of guitar music before the genre enjoyed popularity. He is acerbic - rather than miserable - but make no mistake that the band described by Steve Lamacq as sounding "like a Maths teacher moaning about his girlfriend leaving" would not be headlining the opening Leeds Festival were they twenty years younger. Music - even this music - has changed.

Not that Gedge and his entourage have not changed too most notably in the transformation into opening act Cinerama who were basically The Wedding Present in the late 1990s. Gedge fronts both bands and the revival of the more sweeping, less jangly band first on the bill tonight presents a curious dissection of the main bands work. Starry Eyed is lashed through and seems to provide a pivot point to the 2005 reformed Present and the bedsit janglers who came before and dominate proceedings on this evening.

For tonight - and as preparation to a larger tour in the Autumn - the entirety of the 1990 album Bizzaro is played in order. Brassneck, Kennedy, Take Me and all.

It is too much for some. The crowd - of which I am happy to affiliate myself - are showing age and a mosh pit of balding heads is kind to no one. They bounce and jump in a way that belays their and my advancing years and as Gedge rips through a guitar string or two there is an air of unmistakable release. It did used to be like this - before mortgages and children - and it was as raucously enjoyable as anything post-punk pre-Brit Pop ever got.

The sight of the Weddeos Widows - women dragged by other halves and abandoned at the sides while Sir goes to join the throng at the front could be saddening but there is an easy joy about proceedings. It is reminisce.

Reminisce which is not to be mistake for nostalgia. The Greek word nostalgia literally refers to the pain from an old wound and as Gedge - who starts off with Corduroy and goes into Dare - starts to play three of five new tracks which will be a part of next year's next album the pain is illustrated vividly.

You're Dead is as much about infidelity as anything from any Wedding Present album of the last twenty five years but it talks about iPhones and the relationship rent asunder are more serious, more sombre, more important things.

Enjoy this trip back to your youth - it seems to say - because the pains of then are still the trails of life now. Nothing thing changes but the bodies get older and the aches more heavy.

The pains form old wounds still hurt.

The Blow and Jens Lekman at The Deaf Institute, Manchester

The Blow are not really a band but one would hate to make Khaela Maricich suffer the tag of performance art. Innovative, perhaps to a fault, Maricich's spares vocals over a dance beat accompany a kind of storytelling which veers between believability and fantasy and is all the more entertaining for that. Tonight she relates how she wrote songs for an actress turned singer in New York and the relationship she had with that would be performer and in doing so plays with the notion of the construction of performance. Gradually reducing her attire from baggy top to leotard the affect is a little bit like a confessional Jane Fonda workout video.

It is entertaining, and in its way far more enlightening than one would expect.

The affect of Jens Lekman is always provoking. The Swede folk-popster pours his heart into his performance and seems to bleed emotion from the stage. Tonight he has a full band and a couple of Saxophonist - I may be alone in questioning the merit of the Saxophone in pop - picking out the melodies of his often soft, reflective tunes. As always Lekman is a joy to listen to throwing a few new tunes into the mix alongside staples of his set - would he ever not do Black Cab? I do hope not - and seems to breath a uniqueness into each performance.

Lekman continues the gig over the road at another bar after curfew at The Deaf Institute, and then goes onto the street trying to elongate the still moments his songs attempt to encapsulate. Night falls, the attempt fails, but valiantly so.

Summer Camp and Slow Club at The Cockpit, Leeds

A dozen and a half years ago in the wake of Melody Maker's declaration that they were "the best new band in Britain" - and armed with a demo tape of four tracks - Suede put in faltering performances not dissimilar to Summer Camp's final gig of their first ever tour.

An initial buzz and curious mystery Summer Camp have played a seven song support slot for the last week that - as with Suede's four tracks - vary between songs that have been stuck to one's turntable for the last three months and things that are new to the ears.

Ghost Train - the first release and first played - suffers fro a sound problem that plagues the night at Leeds' Cockpit venue with Elizabeth Sankey's vocal sounding as if it was amplified through a septic tank and Jeremy Warmsley's guitar and keyboard - as well as the second keyboard which put a lie to the idea that the band are a duo - lost under a thud of bass.

Nervously Sankey looked over an audience who struggled to be impressed but - chink by chink - a quality emerged and once the sound problems were if not solves, then a little sated, killer hooks and smart lyrics started to become clearer and Sankey's front woman persona look shape.

Wearing a kind of all in one and wiggling around the stage Sankey comes over as an amalgamation of big haired eighties pop British songstresses like Dana and something more modern and Transatlantic. She is Karen Over-here and she is good adding a sly smile to the smartness and a twee innocence. On best song Was It Worth It she croons "If we weren't at your parent's house/I'd probably cry" and it sounds honest.

One would never have accused Warmsley of honesty in her previous solo career. Twelve months ago when playing Leeds in support of Blue Roses a lyric from the nerd with guitar offered was "If you break her heart/I'll break your legs" which was patiently untrue as it looks as if the bespectacled singer/songwriter would struggle to break an egg. It lacked honesty, had no authenticity.

Which is not to say that Summer Camp are opening their hearts on stage but they are making something with a created core of truth. The songs are lazy sixties beach bingo tunes with girl group vocals and swooning cynicism that battles a smart flick through of music touchstones. They go gospel for an intro, Sankey bends head back on a never heard before tune Warmsley steps back and plays pseudo-metal licks.

The sound - indeed the band - are the creativity of a scrapbook. Nothing strikes one as massively new but everything is arranged in a unique way. Glued in and scribbled over, highlighted and starred and made into something new.

Perhaps then the between song banter - Sankey's referencing of Alan Partridge's Dan wins me over - and the half shambles of trying to sort out a van back to London while on stage is a part of that scrapbook creativity or maybe - as with Suede - the haphazardness is a band who have risen to prominence faster than they have been able to prepare but showing all the signs that they would make it.

For Summer Camp may have read "Best new band in Britain" and stuck that in the scrapbook too.

Slow Club follow and make an impressive entrance cutting through an augmented and enthusiastic audience as a pair playing acoustic guitars stopping at the front to play a first song in the front row. They storm to the stage but are beset with the sound problems that Summer Camp faced but the problem mire the two piece further to a point where the crowd are forced to hush to hear an electric guitar played without amplification.

"It's been shit tonight," says Rebecca Taylor in her gruff South Yorkshire tones "but you've been good" and the band deserve not a review of a gig that they would hope to forget so hard was it to get through a song without the ring of feedback but credit for battering on through it.

Goldheart Assembly at Nation of Shopkeepers, Leeds

London five piece Goldheart Assembly have come to say Hello as they set up in the Nation of Shopkeeper on a Sunday afternoon. Roast beef dinners are served and the beer is passable so wasting an afternoon before the gig seems aimless fun.

The band are a fine bunch of lads - committed to their music and passionate about it - the sit in turns and chat about their Wolves And Thieves album and the horrors of half a dozen lads in a transit van. "If it is Tuesday then this must be Nottingham..."

Few bands are more worth pointing a person in the direction of than Goldheart Assembly making - as they do - a difference to a person's collection and coming from a set of influences which edge to a timeless quality. They give a breadth to your iPod.

Tonight they are in equal measure studious and passionate. They aim high and in songs like So Long St Christopher and King of Rome achieve it and when they do they inspire you to listen to more things, to rifle through a vinyl shop for some Gram Parsons, to expand your music.

No bad thing.

Flight Of The Conchords at Apollo, Manchester

There is a curiosity about New Zealand's world conquering Flight Of The Conchords which alienates as many as it enamours and it is that oddity is the heart of the Jermaine Clements and Bret McKenzie's performance at Manchester's Apollo.

The pair arrive to the stage in a blister of flashes wearing roughly hewn cardboard Robot helmets and hammer though fast tempo tune Too Many Dicks On the Dancefloor at a pace which lets any number of lyrical puns fly by and for a moment one is watching a band, playing music, which could be about anything. Moments later when settled onto stools and holding a pair of guitars they are telling self-depreciating stories about failure with various girls and at a few of life's minor activities.

It is observational comedy set to music and it works very well. A song like Foux du Fafa is smart enough to swerve away from poking fun at the French into amusing itself at the expense of those who put on an air of false sophistication, attention is required to note the difference. Songs like Business Time are greeted as crowd pleasers and the meaning seems to be lost.

When Conchords are best though is in the hard luck story set to music - real music not the whistles and bells of novelty - and in songs Carol Brown they have a template for a kind of humour which is enjoyable on both levels, as a song and an observation. It is bittersweet, for sure, but it is both funny and a song.

A rare combination.