Mansun, De Montfort University, London <br></br>Electric Soft Parade, Concorde 2, Brighton <br></br>Enrique Iglesias, Royal Albert Hall, London

Still ignored after all these years

Alongside Hollyoaks' Gemma Atkinson and a couple of Liverpool strikers, Mansun are unquestionably the greatest thing ever to emerge from the city of Chester.

The press have never quite "got" Mansun, a fact which in some quarters (the NME, for example) manifests itself as outright hostility. The main reason for this is that there's no hook, no easy angle, with which to describe them. Instead, there's a multiplicity of hooks and angles. It isn't that they aren't about anything (Lord preserve us), but that they're about too much.

For a while, they rode shotgun on the Britpop bandwagon, but they always had too many songs about covert transvestitism, heroin whores and perverted clerics to fit in. Their often-epic post-New Wave rock has always been informed by an acidic wit, a cynical intelligence and a keen scepticism, particularly concerning the music business: this is the band who once took a £15,000 video budget from EMI, converted it into £5 notes, scattered them from the balcony of Liverpool Street station at rush hour, filmed the results on a camcorder (businessmen falling to their knees in an unseemly cash-grab), and turned it into the promo clip for a song called "Taxloss".

In an age where it's common for bands to spend the gestation period of a rhinoceros making a record, Mansun, at least, realise that there is something wrong with this state of affairs. This is why, even though their fourth album remains a work-in-progress, they've embarked on a "we're still here" tour to test new material on their impressively rabid hardcore of fans.

Kicking off with "Being A Girl", Paul Draper's curt blast of frustration at the limits of masculinity, they proceed to showcase the as yet untitled record, starting with "Keep Telling Myself", during which Draper convinces the audience to break into "Radio Ga-Ga" overhead handclaps for a song they have never heard before (that takes some balls) and the inevitable single "Sleep Alone".

A handful of oldies are sneaked in to pacify the faithful, including the lavish instrumental "The Chad Who Loved Me", the blinding action-movie drama of "Take it Easy Chicken", and the always awe-inspiring "Wide Open Space", which magnifies agoraphobia and alienation to Zhivago scale (and makes early Tears For Fears seem like a valid influence). The most telling moment comes when Draper turns "Legacy" into an audience singalong mantra: "Nobody cares when you're gone..." Now it's back to the studio and back to work. After all, sometimes nobody cares when you're still there.

What did you do in your spare time at university? While my posher peers were off "finding themselves" in Cambodia, or, I dunno, reading in the library, I spent my summers picking dogs' skulls and used tampons out of the muddy banks of the Thames, demolishing houses in Chelsea, and telling Americans where "the restroom" at Madame Tussaud's was, all in order to ensure that I could still afford to live in my bedsit hovel for another academic year. Work ethic, you see. It's never left me.

Electric Soft Parade are clearly the sort of students who have decided to invest their time – and loans – in the vain (both senses of the word) belief that, at this late stage, they can make a meaningful contribution to musical history. If not the right time, ESP may at least be in the right place. There are tentative whispers of a "Brighton Scene" at the moment, comprising ESP, British Sea Power, Electrelane and The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, and le tout Brighton is here tonight: Zoe'n'Norman, a Leveller, a Comet Gain, and, er, some bloke I vaguely recognise from the Eighties.

Homecoming gigs are traditionally highly charged occasions, but when Electric Soft Parade – a shower of scruffy herberts in khaki skatewear T-shirts and charity shop tuxes (nice to see they've dressed up for the occasion) – amble onstage and start their first song at barely audible volume, it feels as though we've stumbled into a private rehearsal during downtime in the college refectory. "Louder!" shouts Fatboy Slim, not unreasonably. He gets his wish, and it transpires that, discounting a few self-consciously showy moments and token "difficult" time sigs – seven beats to the bar here, an elongated pause there – ESP's blueprint to reinvent rock consists of little more than foursquare early Nineties indie, deeply in hock to a handful of old Ride/Radleys records (or, if they're feeling adventurous, Loop/Spacemen 3). After five songs, people start drifting to the exits, wisely avoiding ESP's pièce de resistance, a closing psychedelic freakout which seems to last longer than the Champions League final which preceded the gig, but without a single Zidane Moment to cherish.

As the tide of history moves slowly but inexorably away from the Hereditary Principle, pop music is striving to keep it alive. How else can you explain the appeal of Enrique Iglesias? If the capacity to govern is poorly served by hand-me-down genetics, then the capacity to make great music shows the principle to be flawed even more deeply. Has Jakub Dylan written a "Queen Jane Approximately"? The Webb Brothers a "MacArthur Park"? Enrique Iglesias a ... Well, there's the rub. The case for second-generation stardom collapses completely if you fail to believe that Hispanic crooner Julio Iglesias was ever any good in the first place. Enrique has all the try-hard, achieve-little talent of a particularly docile Kid From Fame, but he does have his daddy's wrinkly, twinkly eyes, and that, combined with his lean Latino physique, is all his 95 per cent female (and 100 per cent foxy) audience care about. There's something oddly non-exploitative about the way this crowd ogles Enrique's snakeskin-clad Spanish ass. There's a complicity here, a mutuality you don't get with most other pin-ups. This is mainly because Enrique's crowd know exactly what they're doing, and exactly what they're getting.

It's pure fromage, naturally. The cheesiest moment is a tie between the part where he complains "I'm getting old", collapses onto his back, and pants, "huh-huh-huh", into the mic, and the part where he serenades a grope-happy divorcee who looks like Helen Lederer. The music is a mere sideshow, his own meagre catalogue (you don't wanna know) interspersed with atrocious karaoke cover versions, including a mangling of Prince's "Purple Rain" so horrible that I want to kill him. Unfortunately, I've calmed down by the time he skips over to my row during Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough" and accepts a chiffon scarf from the middle-aged mum sitting next to me. "'E kept it, bless 'im", she squawks to her daughters, brushing aside a storm of tinsel-cannon gold. She's happy, they're happy. The deal is done.

s.price@independent.co.uk

Mansun: Zodiac, Oxford (01865 420042), tonight; JBs, Dudley (01384 253597), Mon; Liverpool University (0151 256 5555), Tue; Ambassador Theatre, Dublin (00 353 01648 6000), Fri