Electric Picnic: The Stranglers - What happened to the heroes?

Only a fool would say that, forty years later, The Stranglers have mellowed. Yet Baz Warne and the black-clad new-wavers put their formidable back catalogue to the service of an early afternoon with some snarling good humour.

Poking fun at the pretensions of backstage rockstars and their own apparent invincibility – "We're the oldest band you'll see this weekend," says Barne, "well, maybe the Pet Shop Boys." – they rumble through their roughhewn and influential classics, even dispensing early with the peerless Golden Brown and Always the Sun – subversive and spry as ever – together with the more recent and still superb Relentless.

They even find time for their reverential covers of Dionne Warwick and The Kinks, and today the intention behind them rings clear: here is sincere tribute to music that endures.

Ignore the lyrics of their closer No More Heroes. Some of them are still standing.

In three words: Garrotte ‘n’ roll Like this? See this: The Horrors