Looks can be deceptive. An array of album covers, peeking out from a cluttered table in Whelan's boasted all the putrid colours, acid fonts and semi-nudity synonymous with free love, writes Peter Crawley

Selling them were a group of Japanese musicians dressed in black, with rude, slogan-plastered skater T-shirts hinting at the availability of love, but possibly at a price.

Maybe Acid Mothers Temple - or rather, the touring quintet that have splintered away from the 30-piece collective - really are replicated relics from the summer of love, pedalling psychedelia in the age of PlayStation.

Maybe they're mortifyingly hip young Tokyo-ites with an over-developed penchant for retro-kitsch.

But the far, far more likely explanation is that they are time-travellers. Playing to a venue packed like a morning bullet train, AMT delivered a temporal flux of noise rock, Japanese folk, piercing guitar solos, heedless jazz-style improvising on electronic instruments, punctuated with central-Asian throat-singing, little of which signalled a major departure from the uninhibited exploration of acid rock.

Hearkening back to the past while lunging towards the future, AMT continued the tradition of brave experimentation.