Returning to a painfully beautiful Bath - it always is, on sunny days - I find myself picking up a McDonald’s Strawberry shake for the first time in years. Only after I’ve re-acquainted myself with its unique hyper-artificial coolant fluid taste it actually strikes me as a good metaphor for the experience of dragging my corpse over to London to see Bis. I haven’t done it for years, it’s clearly bad for me, it’s deeply self-indulgent and I love it more than life itself.

It ended up being nowhere near as weird as I was suspecting it to be. The crowd wasn’t quite the little retro hellhole I was half expecting. The irony of Bis playing a 10 year reunion gig was obvious: Bis were a group of teenagers whose most iconic songs were about wanting to be in primary school. Their auto-generated mythology hailed their Teen-C nation. The image of ageing glitterkids is more than a little horrific. I only bumped into one zinekid before the gig - the ever-towering James Cha, appropriately, the gateway to that whole little world for me - and a handful of others on the way out. The crowd was younger than I expected - which is only logical. A lot of bis fans a decade on… well, still early-mid twenties. Flossie and I ended up in our usual state of being pretty much oldest blokes there, same as it ever was.

Sci-fi Steven and John Disco (And writing the names down makes me smile and realise how Bis really set themselves up to be thourghly mocked) were charmingly bald. Manda-Rin was worryingly hot. The stage-moves were the same, a mixture of shameless gawk and undiluted energy. And the whole thing… well, it - to paraphrase the last comment thread - partied like it was 1997. The set gravitated towards the album whose anniversary the gigs celebrated, with only a couple of tracks from Social Dancing and nowt from after it, and a load even from the pre-Kandy-Pop days. In other words, the exact moment where they were a supreme irritant and revelatory pop band, a dream collision between Betty Boo and the Nation of Ulysses.

Images stick out from the mess of punk-drumbox-ska-POP!!!! (Add your own glitter stars to the screen at this point). How Manda-Rin’s Poly-Styrene for the nineties siren voice can cut right through you and - like X-Ray Spex circa Oh Bondage! - remains the sound of fearless permission. (Before they come back for the inevitable Kandy-Pop closing encore, they play Monstarr, which they’ve always played and has never been any good but its sentiments and shamelessness mean that it’s beyond perfect for then. Manda-Rin annoys you? Well here’s Manda-Rin though a FUCKING LOUDSEAKER. Fuck off Dadrockers, etc). A mass of slogans, as slogans are always funny. Personal mythologies; Your own little worlds. How Flossy noted that Eurodisco/You’re So Disco! was made for crowds far bigger than this to shout back at them. Remembering the first rush on hearing them, and trying in my pre-pop-literate states explain them to a girl who I fancied their merits: The Pixies at 110rpm. How, even though I was doing fanzines before I heard them, they were the first band I ever arranged an interview with. How much I owe them.

I got phenomenally drunk and then danced it all out. Woke up feeling clean and pure and dehydrated, in about equal measures.