FEW bands still bother with the old-school rules of rock’n’roll. For Primal Scream, who have kept them by their bedside for the past two decades, they remain the bible for being in a band.

Hence, Bobby Gillespie, the band’s fortysomething frontman, is still as thin as a pin when he saunters on stage, salutes his fans and quickly dismisses any thought of small talk. Within minutes, he is on his knees, assaulting the floor with one hand, holding his mic in the other. He has already done his skippy dance steps that date back to the Eighties, pulled the odd Iggy pose and shaken his newly grown hair at the trio of guitarists hard at work by his side, who purposely ignored him because, well, they’re cool too.

The Scream faithful — not just the ones pogoing at the front, the entire crowd has been here before, umpteen times you don’t doubt — bask in the aura of real rock’n’rollers. Yet to accuse Gillespie’s group of treading water would be wrong. Sailing back over stormy seas is more apt. Since beginning their career as jangly indie popsters, Primal Scream have been through several musical incarnations. The most memorable was the guitar-dance fusion that spawned Screamadelica, their early Nineties album, but more recent forays into dark, electronic rock have also been critically acclaimed. In fact, the only Primals incarnation given the thumbs down was their brief try at bluesy rock just before Britpop stormed the charts.

Yet it is to there that the band have returned for their forthcoming album, Riot City Blues, and the spectre of the Stones haunted Astoria’s stage for much of the night. The opening number, Country Girl, released next month as a single, was driven by repetitive riffs and augmented by a pair of female soul singers touting tambourines, but like much of the new material it possessed a swaggering sense of fun and a catchy chorus that the crowd loved. Just to prove where they’re at, Primal Scream peppered their set with old songs such as Jailbird and Rocks, which sound better now than they did a decade ago, although they also found time for the techno-tinged Swastika Eyes and Kowalski, plus a fabulous Movin’ On Up from Screamadelica.

At times, you had to suspend disbelief to accept that a sextet of middle-aged men could get away with new songs that boasted titles such as Suicide Sally & Johnny Guitar, but then Primal Scream have always belied their age. Nitty Gritty, another new number, had as much MTV appeal as Arctic Monkeys, and probably more chance of breaking the States. Another era for the old rockers? You wouldn’t bet against it.