Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

There are few bands in Wales as warmly regarded as . This is mostly to do with the unarguable qualities of their music. It is also to do with their history. The forerunners of this band, , were a charming, whimsical alternative to the stodgy earnestness of many of their contemporaries. Their only album, Songs Of Ignorance, is the Welsh : an almost-lost Eldorado of an album.

But if The Keys were reading this, they'd be shaking their heads and tutting:

"Enough of the past, already!"

They'd have a point. But when it comes to explaining why tens of people have foregone an afternoon on the beer watching England's World Cup game against Algeria so that they can come and watch The Keys instead, much of the love and loyalty in these people was sown back in the Murry The Hump days.

And thank god for that love. Because at 9:30pm, guileless, witless, clueless football just finished, the venue is empty. Five football phobics sit outside basking in the evening rays. I'm playing scratchy vinyl in the corner hoping - praying - that at least a handful of people will have foregone the football in order to witness some rare musical chemistry.

And, for once, my prayers are answered. Something uplifting (and obscure - why isn't this song better known?) from The Five Stairsteps and the venue is quickly filling. Lots of eager faces, regular supporters of Welsh music over the last couple of decades, have filed into the venue.

"Are they as good live as they are on the albums?" Paz asks me at the DJ booth, and the honest answer is: "I can't remember. I haven't seen 'em for five years." (But, still, I do tell him "yes, amazing!" with fingers only half-crossed.)

There was a long hiatus of frustration and label problems between the Keys' dΓ©but album and this year's excellent follow-up, Fire Inside (See Monkey Do Monkey). A hiatus of such soul-eroding inertia that the band almost gave it all up. And that despite rumours that the songs they had recorded for a second album were of the absolute highest quality.

Those rumours were confirmed when demos of Fire Inside and Chemistry surfaced. Fire Inside sounded like a lost psych classic, a beautiful second cousin of Incense And Peppermints. But Chemistry was the song that got most people's earbuds salivating: a beautiful, lilting, bruised heart of a song. One of the most exquisite from any Welsh band ever. And as grandiose hyperbolic proclamations go, that's one of my best, but also one of my truest.

Fittingly they start the set with Fire Inside - and despite the fact that it is shorn of the garage organ that so authentically embellishes the album version, it sounds ace: hungry, sharp, affectionate, affecting. And the reaction to the band is all these things, too. Okay, we're not talking a stadium full of people, here, but the hundred or so people watching are transported and elevated by the band's voodoo charms. And 'voodoo' isn't a word chosen casually.

Apart from the artfully played slow songs, most of the set is bolstered by primal blues riffs and rhythms. The Keys understand that the best rock n roll is sexual, and that lustful energy drives the set along, leaving an audience not too bemused by some of the more out there, psychedelic interludes sweaty and satiated.

The elephant in the room is the retroactive perspective from which every one of these songs is drawn, If you're dismissive of form over content, then it would be easy to ignore The Keys on the facetious basis that they sound so steeped in 60s psych and garage rock. If you're something of a fan of that period - of the influence of Love, 13th Floor Elevators and The Beatles - you'll hear the threads of those bands woven with great love throughout The Keys' music.

It's much more than trainspotting chord sequences and sounds from a generation ago, though. These songs have an emotional core. Hearing Matt sing "I'm as lonely as a hole in the ground" towards the end of the set on O Lord! is transfixing. He endows these old sounds with now feeling and now charisma. But nowness is nothing to get hung up on.

It's not always about being original. It's about being good. And tonight The Keys were brilliant.