What a great fucking idea! Or maybe it's the worst idea in the world... As my shrink used to say "I think what we're looking for here is a balance." But there can be no balance tonight. This whole affair is definitively, primordially off-kilter, and all gathered here must suffer misaligned passions and historical slippage, tipping this way into revelation and that way into grief and embarrassment. Here's how it works, at any rate: a band of punk rock veterans, a shifting line-up—sort of a rump parliament—that has included at various times ex-members of Devo, Circle Jerks, Bad Religion, Black Flag, Minutemen and Social Distortion, pump out a string of pre-'83 classics so members of the audience can get up and SING (bellow, moan, whatever). The songs are listed at the T-shirt stand, lyric sheets are available, all you do is sign up. The crowd is the colour of doused embers, in a collective sulk of black jeans and black boots and black hooded sweatshirts. Mood lighting here at the Middle East is one cold blue bulb, a dingy radiance falls on all the faces, and I haven't seen such an excellently shitty-looking bunch for ages. But they sign up, by God. They go for it. Anonymous champions rise—some flecked with indecision, almost brittle about the jowls with nerves. Others are like wolves for the limelight. A kid at the back is pacing and studying his lyric sheet, lips moving. He's a big kid, with a square head, and his version of "Pretty Vacant" will be a little meaty in the end, somewhat overly beefed, but something here blesses him for his efforts.

Tonight we have Dez Cadena, ex-Black Flag, on guitar. And Greg Hetson, ex-Circle Jerks and Bad Religion, also on guitar. The character on bass, who I believe is Eric Melvin from NOFX, makes a fine MC, nicely managing the exits and entrances of various drunkards, narcissists, and bags of nerves. "See? It's fun!" he says. He makes thumbsucking gestures when some faded prince of Boston hardcore gets up brandishing about his Slapshot jacket. The band are attired in battered smoking jackets, to denote I presume their official backing-band status—no preening for them tonight, no buffing up of reputations. In all senses they are humbled by this stuff, cheerfully humiliated, whether by the simple grinning pleasure of playing idiot chords or by the fact that they are putting all their expertise in the service of rank amateurs, blunderers, song-wreckers, and energy-holes. Two girls make a flimsy attempt on the Go-Go's "We Got The Beat" and Jesus Christ, how plaintive and lost-sounding do those words become, you wouldn't believe it unless you heard it— "We got the beat... (fumble)... yeah... we got (sniff)... the beat" —as they drop the lyric sheet and miss the chorus and the band go to hell entirely, swapping rueful looks. But this is part of the ritual, of course. An excess of competence would arouse suspicion.

It's the gift of karaoke sometimes to be realer-than-real—the karaoke god accepts at his altar all forms of sincerity and bloated ardour, all clumsiness of the soul. He welcomes every lunge at greatness. In an almost-empty pub in East London once (The Cat and Mutton) I saw a man with stonewashed jeans and thin dull hair about the collar unburden himself—until his neck shook—of some shitey rock track, like it was his heart's true testament, which no doubt it was. His mouth was prissy with passion, his shapeless leg was pumping. The heavy metal pieties roared out of him good as new, every cliché refreshed. It was naked and turgid and stunningly loud—a triumph, in other words. So tonight, when the people want it badly enough, nonentity is made the needle-eye through which glory comes a-peeping. Who is that plump and greyhaired fellow in the leather jacket doing a Bad Religion song? Fuck knows! And yet he jabs the air and leads the band and makes it happen with the authority of a thousand private rehearsals, his biggest dream on action replay, not a glance at the lyrics. And who's that doing "California Über Alles"? Again, no one I know, but it absolutely STINGS, no old jokes here, Biafra's satire wasp-like as it ever was in sharpness and mobility. And then some caterwauling boob makes a hash of "Sailin' On." Parody lurks, of course: Black Flag's "Nervous Breakdown" gets an airing and a couple of stage-invaders go lumbering through the stations of what was once upon a time—say twenty years ago—called the Huntington Beach Skank. You know, the gibbon lurch, the prowl of a hungry cretin—it always looked sort of stupid, and tonight it looks super-stupid, like a Stone Age wardance. The mike disappears wearily into the front row for "Minor Threat" (the song)—ah, THAT was the sound of DC hardcore, a rabble of unmiked voices drowned out by the band—and you are suddenly bone-certain that Ian MacKaye would not be seen dead within fifty miles of this location.

But hey, wasn't it all, in a manner of speaking, karaoke? Henry Garfield springing onstage at the 7A in New York City to do "Clocked In" with Black Flag, a week before he joined the band and became Rollins? MacKaye himself doing Wire's "12XU" at the Bayou in DC, with the Bad Brains behind him? All the singalongs, the friction of heads, all the young goons jostling to shout "STRAIGHT EDGE!" into the mike, or "IF THE KIDS—ARE UNITED!"? Karaoke, karaoke! There's nothing sacred about this music—it was always disposable—it belonged, immediately and with incredible urgency, to its audience. The thump and crackle, the raw hook-up with the body's motor systems, it was all there for the taking.

Was, was, was—nostalgia is a sickness of course, autumnal mould upon the brain, but these sources are not dead yet, blackened by usage yes but not dead. Two freaks assume the stage, freaks—a wide-eyed aghast mod, spiked into innocence by (one imagines) the purest methamphetamine, and a lewd character in a tight jean-jacket, tickling the air with demon tongue—and the Buzzcocks "Orgasm Addict" just... happens, just sort of generates itself out of thirteen or so random electrical crack-ups. There is power arcing through these slapdash versions, an intensity that lights the eyes of the amateur frontmen with a weird blaze—what is it, dreams on fire? The reflected glare of toppling burning towers? Are we—is the question—still worthy of this?