Bush have long been a source of wonder in this country. How could a troupe of blatantly derivative Nirvana-heads from west London become the only current English band most Americans have ever heard of? Even Oasis can't fill the megadomes that Bush pack every time they do one of their sweeps of the Midwest, and singer Gavin Rossdale is rock royalty over there, proving the potency of a few angsty tunes and a Briddish (now actually mid-Atlantic) accent.

Kerri Haza, a 22-year-old who's flown over from Pennsylvania for this short UK tour, has the answer: "It's his animal magnetism." It's her eighth Bush gig, but the first time she's seen Rossdale and his anonymous sidekicks at such excitingly close quarters. Compared to the hangars they normally play, the Palais is a cupboard, so Rossdale's magnetising vibes have only a short distance to travel between stage and back wall. And yes, there is something about those boy-bandish cheekbones, and the unironic way he thanks us for our "positive energy". When he dedicates Letting the Cables Sleep to an HIV-positive friend - "He's doing fine now" - it's clear he's a pleasant person, too. That probably explains the phalanx of long-stemmed blondes with backstage passes.

But what of the music? Another pleasant surprise. Nobody could ever call Bush's grinding gloomcore innovative, but they invest it with so much feeling that they can no longer be written off as grunge wannabes. Greedy Fly shows them to have a streak of goth a mile wide, which Rossdale carries off with aplomb (not easy), while Mouth combines heaviosity and grace more deftly than any of their Seattle heroes. We could have done without the lead-booted Spacetravel, from current LP The Science of Things, mostly because earnest anti-Labour diatribes and moshing teenagers don't mix. But the diamond-bright Everything Zen, inspired by Rossdale's envy of Suede's success, of all things, has a stomp-along chorus that's reason enough for it to exist.

Rossdale makes a grand rock star, too. All those stadium gigs have trained him to work a crowd, and he's got the knack of seeming both aloof and touchable. He makes his way deep into the crowd halfway through the ludicrously-titled Insect Kin and a circle magically opens around him. Kerri pushes her way through and returns looking radiant: "Definite animal magnetism," she swoons. Anyone who can do that to an audience should be taken seriously.