A Certain Ratio @ Stereo, Glasgow, 17 Mar

Tonight at Stereo, A Certain Ratio – the band who commonly get mixed up with other funky bunches who were around in the 80s – are not mucking around. After taking the stage to joyous applause from a varied audience, they’re straight in with the tightly-packed funk the people who didn’t necessarily buy their records know and love them for. After a hiatus in the 90s and early noughties, around ten years ago they started shaking their stuff again: dub, funk and disco all present.

Their use of cowbells, saxophone, the odd wooden block and a referee’s whistle make them look, pleasingly, like a school band put together by the waistcoated head of the music department circa 1982. Jez Kerr’s plaintive but emotive vocals are ace too, scotching the rumour (if it ever needed scotching amongst right-thinking people) that carrying a tune requires 'from-a-book' technique. Vocalist Denise Johnson commandeers the soaring vocals, landing somewhere near earth again on Won’t Stop Loving You, a song with gentle New Order-esque grooves.

A Certain Ratio are no nostalgia act, but they’re arguably at their best when you can close your eyes and pretend it’s 1986. They have such command of the room as the gig goes on that Kerr could easily use his powers to start a cult: he’s a nice man, though, and instead he leads the charge on a powerfully funky outing of Shack Up. It’s interesting to note that after years of wading through the workaday indie world of moaning in song when, say, relationships go wrong, it’s probably more effective – are you listening, Morrissey? – to thrash out these problems musically with funk and a rightly-timed tambourine.

At times, the bare bass threatens to turn into the theme tune from Seinfeld, as all funky bass must eventually do. But half the audience are too young to know about any of that and the older half, well, we know it’s a small price to pay for a groovy gig like this. Everything you could reasonably ask for from a gig is here: the whole thing is a bang-on meeting of musicianship and living, breathing funk.