FIVE years since they last performed in Britain, Beastie Boys arrived in Glasgow on Saturday night for the start of a short tour to promote their album To The 5 Boroughs. The album — a hip-hop homage, if you will, to their native New York — topped the US chart this year, and the band remain a perennial live attraction.

Beastie Boys did not look like a group built to last when they first toured Britain in 1987 as co-headliners with Run DMC. Like the Sex Pistols before them, they arrived on the scene in such a blaze of negative publicity that it threatened to consume them. But Adam Horowitz (Adrock), Adam Yauch (MCA) and Michael Diamond (Mike D) were always too smart to fall into the trap of believing their own hype, and too industrious to squander all that early momentum.

Not only have they influenced everyone from Happy Mondays to Eminem, they have also stayed the course in much the same way as did many of the controversial originators of rock’n’roll.

Compared with their previous tour, which was a complicated production staged in the round, the new Beastie Boys show is a return to hip-hop basics. Perched atop a massive platform, their DJ, Mix Master Mike, began the proceedings with a dazzling display of stuttering jiggery-pokery on his record decks before the three Boys came slouching on.

Dressed in a uniform of black tracksuits and baseball caps, they batted the vocal lines of Root Down and Triple Trouble back and forth between them with a brattish zeal — like three John McEnroes in full flight — while the vision mixer flung up images on the split screens behind them that were as cleverly interwoven as the voices themselves.

The leaping and shouting belied their advancing years. Mike D, 39, now looks more like a petrol pump attendant than a rap star, while the 40-year-old MCA’s hair has acquired an elegant frosting of grey. But if the energy levels remained impressively in the red, there was a more thoughtful quality to numbers from the new album, such as An Open Letter To NYC, during which various images of the New York skyline (with the twin towers still defiantly intact) played across the screens.

A mini-stage, bedecked with Chinese lanterns, was wheeled out halfway through, and the trio, by this time playing guitar, bass and drums and joined by the percussionist Alfredo Ortiz and organist Money Mark, morphed into the lounge-band personae that they deployed on their 1996 instrumental album, The In Sound from Way Out.

The change of gear left the audience nonplussed, but normal service was resumed with a string of quick-fire favourites including Paul Revere and Brass Monkey, and an encore of Intergalactic, which they performed in a little enclave amid the fans on the floor at the very back of the auditorium. Reconvening onstage, they picked up their instruments again for a thunderous finale of Sabotage, which they dedicated for no very obvious reason to President Bush. Four more years of Beastie Boys? On this showing, that seems the least we can expect.

The Beastie Boys tour continues at MEN Arena, Manchester, tonight.