We're heading for the silly season. For the next month or so, the TV companies will dig out those old episodes of Top of The Pops that are banned for the rest of the year. Bizarre but loveable creatures (well, OK, Roy Wood) will stalk our screens in five feet of hair and make-up, while at least every third band will have a guitarist dressed as a gorilla.

Meanwhile, people of all generations will be entitled to sigh wistfully and wonder when, exactly, pop's sense of humour was finally stifled by the age of mass marketing. Well, as Bent are determined to demonstrate, it isn't dead.

One of them (Simon Mills) has blue hair; the other (Nail) looks like Norman Bates, and they both model sideburns Elvis would have declared over the top. Arriving onstage to the Theme From Tin Tin and flashed up logos of 20th Century Fox, they soon take what sounds suspiciously like an old Simple Minds tune and mangle it out of shape - hence their moniker, Bent.

Often compared to Air (much to their chagrin), Bent's Mills and, er Nail are in fact impossible to pin down. Between songs, they amuse themselves with end-of-the-pier country and western, stilted 50s public information soundtracks and the repeated loop of the word "toilet".

It's exceedingly silly but you can't help laughing with them. However, after tickling the audience into submission, they deliver the unexpected twist: these madcaps are creating some extraordinarily beautiful music.

Although fascinated with old-fashioned notions of the future - weedy synths, Tomorrow's World and astronaut cartoons - Bent have combined this with 80s pop and 90s rave to construct music full of character. The ancient drum machine from OMD's Electricity is just as likely to appear as what sounds like Ofra Hazra put through a blender, along with only scarcely recognisable echoes of everyone from the Cocteau Twins to Orbital to the Beloved.

In keeping with their humour, singer Zoe is introduced like a pub turn but her ethereal, slightly Julee Cruise vocals inspire things further. By the end, they've attained a stunning, trancelike, headline-at-Glastonbury magnificence.

One day, Bent will have to decide whether to abandon the laughs and go more seriously for the jugular. But for the moment they're having a fabulous time.

As they leave the stage laughing, their hi-tech film show flashes up: "Happy birthday to my girlfriend, Claire."