The high-energy 1980s back to the stage

the brilliantly versatile Tom Parsons, Rebecca Lisewski and house band – help create an episodic narrative where our millennials seem isolated by the pressures of modern life or indeed by the technologies meant to connect them. The witty Bla Bla Bla Cha Cha Cha has every dancer glued to their mobile phone, not their flesh and blood partner.

When bodies do collide in the same groove, then – with nice touches of humour or sudden tenderness – the cleverly choreographed sparks fly. And never more so than when Flavia and Vincent are in hold, proving all the superlatives that attach to their partnership are inadequate: they are breath-taking beyond words, as their final, fiercely intense tango to Oliver Lewis’s gypsy violin patently, memorably, proves. for BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now strand in their diaries. The people who faithfully turn out for his spring Tectonics weekend are plainly happy to listen to new music at other times of the year.

The bulk the programme was devoted to the music of American James Tenney, with two big pieces, Diapason and Clang separated by a solo for double bass, Beast, performed by Dominic Lash. That miniature of drone and harmonics with next to no variation of volume and pace was a mesmerising encapsulation of the composer’s practice. Clang, the earlier work, employed a fairly conventional orchestra layout for his individual kind of minimalism, while Diapason seeded winds and brass among the strings for its long, slow crescendo in common time and faster diminuendo to a few strings. Whether the onstage geography is detectable when the works are broadcast on March 10 will be interesting to listen for.

My guess is that the specifics of the instrumental layout required by Jose Montserrat Maceda for his Distemperament, performed in the first half, will be more obvious. Here all the instruments were represented in trios with the basses, bassoons, and trombones leading the way on a succession of overlapping phrases that were played like triggered samples in different voices. With trumpets and flutes in unaccustomed stage front positions, the work is a huge textural exercise, sometimes militaristic and culminating in waves of cascading notes passed around the sections from strings to winds and brass. Fascinating stuff, and to my ears, the more impressive work of the evening.

The place of the late co-founder and lead guitarist Stuart Adamson has been taken by fellow Big Country cohort Bruce Watson and son Jamie, whose axeman partnership has elevated the new Skids.

With the new album Burning Cities released the following day, it was no surprise they opened with one of the album highlights, This Is Our World.

But there is no questioning the appeal of the classics, and so the moshing really began when the first bars of Working For The Yankee Dollar rung out followed by a triumphant The Saints Are Coming.

A touching clapping tribute to Adamson preceded a faithful run-through of Scared To Dance by which time we have discovered that Jobson thinks Jamie Watson looks like Ed Sheeran.

“Well, it could be worse,” ventured Jobson. “No it could not,” shouted a good number of the packed venue.

Jobson may declare that simple-isgenius TV Stars with its “Albert Tatlock” chant is the worst song they’ve done but it does not stop it from having pride of place as the final song of the night, even though it appeared it was being ousted for new song Kaputt.

And off we went, having had confirmed, as if confirmation was needed, that the Skids were and still are quite simply brilliant.