Chemical Brothers, Civic Hall, Wolverhampton <br/> Towers of London, Electric Ballroom, London

Here's one we recorded earlier...

What do the Chemical Brothers actually do? Smoke, that's what. Oh, I'm not suggesting that Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands' dressing room is fumigated by Class Cs (although, let's face it, the chances are, er, high). But after some ominous monastic chanting has heralded their imminent presence in the Civic Hall, the Chem Bros' first - and, it transpires, arguably most important - act, upon assuming their positions behind their banks of machinery, is to lean over to the smoke machine, press "On", and fill the air with dry ice. Because, let there be no doubt, a Chemical Brothers gig is essentially the now-discontinued "Laserium" show at the London Planetarium, with a hipper soundtrack.

What do the Chemical Brothers actually do? Smoke, that's what. Oh, I'm not suggesting that Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands' dressing room is fumigated by Class Cs (although, let's face it, the chances are, er, high). But after some ominous monastic chanting has heralded their imminent presence in the Civic Hall, the Chem Bros' first - and, it transpires, arguably most important - act, upon assuming their positions behind their banks of machinery, is to lean over to the smoke machine, press "On", and fill the air with dry ice. Because, let there be no doubt, a Chemical Brothers gig is essentially the now-discontinued "Laserium" show at the London Planetarium, with a hipper soundtrack.

One always tends to deny the benefit of the doubt to dance acts, suspecting that they just press "Start" on the Minidisc player, then spend the rest of the gig surreptitiously working through a few levels of GTA: San Andreas. Whether or not this is the case with the Chems is difficult to gauge. However, from the moment the refrain of "Hey Boy, Hey Girl" ("superstar DJs, here we go!") rips through the room - a fantastic way to open a gig, it must be said - their oddly passive body language suggests that this music is something which happens to them, rather than them happening to it.

Tom, long since shorn of his yak-like locks, now has frazzled clumps of electrocuted spikes, and leans into his consoles with the stance of a man fighting to walk through a wind tunnel. He reminds me of no one so much as Dr Emmett Brown, the mad scientist in Back to the Future. Ed, meanwhile, has lost his beer belly, and leaps around in what amounts to a crop top, palms aloft, cheerleading. "Those Chemical Brothers, eh?" he seems to be saying. "Aren't they great?" Bereft of the physical presence of the guest vocalists - from Noel Gallagher to Q-Tip, from The Magic Numbers to Tim Burgess - who lend their personalities to their recorded works, the Chems (who never sing or speak) desperately need something - anything - to avert the lingering feeling that they might just as easily have sent a couple of dummies on tour, whacked in Singles 1993-2003 and Push the Button on random play, and collected the ticket receipts.

A Chemical Brothers show is essentially a portable party - or, to use a quaintly cusp-of-the-Nineties term, a "rave" - and a rammed, sauna-steamy Civic Hall-full of Midlanders (10 per cent hipsters, 90 per cent chavs) treat it as such, jiggling glow-sticks and dancing in circles to the block-rockin' beats, often, tellingly, with their backs to the stage.

If you do choose to face the front, you might see some marching tin robots on the big screen, an electronically-generated manor house (ah, "house music", I see what they did there!), or, at one point, footage from the Poll Tax riots. It's an interesting development that dance acts (see also Faithless) are now appropriating the iconography of 31 March, 1990 whereas, at the time, the dance scene was perceived as a blissed-out holiday from reality. Could they, one might cynically surmise, be retrospectively using the imagery of urban strife for its "sexiness", or are they making some kind of point? Either way, there is no more exciting sound in music than a siren (to which the riot footage is perhaps the visual equivalent). Public Enemy knew it, and the Chemical Brothers know it too: it's deployed more than once tonight. Unless, of course, someone's called the cops. Too late. Tom and Ed have got away with it again.

Last week's Camden Crawl - a crazy event involving scores of bands playing in a multitude of NW1 venues, all for a single wristband - had many highlights: The Departure, Magic Numbers and the Buzzcocks being my personal choices. But one stands out.

Towers of London are the most notorious, remorseless, antisocial band in Britain right now. In an era when the term "punk" has been so devalued that it is routinely applied to nice corporate Christian boys like Good Charlotte, TOL are refreshingly - to borrow a catchphrase from one of their direct forerunners - "4 REAL". With a slogan comprising three simple imperatives - "Drink! Fight! Fuck!" - this huge-haired quintet of dirt-rockers walk it like they talk it. Stories of arrests for disorder and criminal damage are becoming common currency in the news pages of the music press. And before the band has even taken the stage, I meet a gang of delightful young ladies from a southern seaside town. "Towers of London?" they grin. "We've had 'em, a couple of weeks ago. But we've got boyfriends, so we're going back to them now..." Donny Tourette saunters insolently onstage and gurns with his tongue in his chin, à la John Lennon, to make a playground Joey Deacon "spastic" face. He flicks a lit-up fag end carelessly into some innocent spectator face, shakes up a can and sprays it at us. Towers of London haven't played a note yet, and instantly I love them.

The noise they make, on tracks like the exhilarating single "On a Noose", is white trash rock'n'roll, "Welcome to the Jungle" meets "Holidays in the Sun". It occurs to me that Towers of London are what Sex Pistols might have been like if Johnny Rotten had never been born, and Sid Vicious was the singer.

There is - quite deliberately, it seems - no edge of intellect here. I don't anticipate hearing Tourette sing a couplet as poetic as "When there's no future how can there be sin?/ We're the flowers in the dustbin..." ("God Save the Queen"). That's not to say they're witless, or without wit. What they are, however, is artfully artless, knowingly delinquent. Just like the early Manic Street Preachers - of whose exploits they remind me greatly - Towers of London, I suspect, know exactly what they're doing, and they're in love with their own (self-created) mythology. Despite the appearance of chaos, there's a great deal of attention to detail here. For example, they all have the big Motley Crüe hair: there's no short fat bloke on drums, or aging uncle on keyboards to let the side down. (And, in a time-honoured tradition which runs from the Stones via the Dolls to the Manics, there's one properly pretty member on guitar.)

There's some fantastic formation axework, in which the three players of stringed instruments (wearing DIY spraypainted "Stop This Band" and "Try and Shop Me" vests) rush forward and hold their fretboards aloft in identical poses. There's a playfight which culminates in guitarist Dirk Tourette standing on his brother Donny's chest. There's some petty dissing of journalists, an attack on the "prawn sandwich brigade" up on the balcony, and a perfect put-down aimed at a missile-thrower. By the time Donny petulantly slams down his microphone and stalks off, I'm smiling ear to ear.

s.price@independent.co.uk