Beneath the glitterballs and behind the smokescreen, gyrating in a pristine plastic Space 1999 vision of the future. Pulp are the band World Of Twist always fancied themselves to be. Charmed, poised pseudy-dandies with a dash of off-kilter glamour, a rocketship full of celestial discopop style and - God, yes - wit, tonight they expose their clunking Manc copyists as Hawkwind with one trick and a spangly shirt, baggy's ugly brother locked in the dressing-up cupboard. In a very real sense, they're galaxies apart.

Kitsch is rarely as beguiling as this, comedy rarely treated with such high seriousness. There's a keyboardist spraying out fizzy ray-gun effects on a stylophone, a lurching bassist who's close to passing out, and a mad-eyed guitarist/violinist struggling to get either instrument consistently in tune, collapsing together with implausible success. And then there's Jarvis Cocker: deadpan crooner and ace Jimmy Savile impersonator, shimmying and hand-jiving like a graduate from a Blue Peter disco-dancing class. In some synthetic, glitter-dusted future, all pop groups will be like this.

In the past, of course, all pop groups from Sheffield have been a bit like this, with varying degrees of irony. But Pulp, pretty much alone amongst the faddists and the futurists, have survived, releasing records roughly once a decade until this month when, more by accident than design, they've a single and album out soon on different labels. 'OU', the single, makes a galloping, deliciously histrionic showing. Toytown Techno speeded up beyond good sense, until Jarvis is left posed, pointing at the ceiling approximately two inches above his head with all the grandeur and tragedy of an amateur Jesus Christ Superstar.

At least two songs are strutting dead ringers for "I Will Survive', "You Don't Want Me Anymore' is a Toytown tango spooked and stretched to blowzily dramatic extremes, and the final 'My Legendary Girlfriend' is an intense, ecstatic marathon that renders all other music, for a perfect ten minutes, utterly redundant.

Top entertainment, in other words.