If all goes to plan, Magick, the new single by Klaxons, should crash into the Top 10 tonight. Sporting luminous bangles and blowing its whistles, new rave — after rabble-rousing shows at Reading, Leeds and London’s Koko — will have officially arrived. Anybody who feels strangely moved at the sight of Day-Glo clothing, beware: it’s in Klaxons’ dress code, and they reckon “this country needs to party”. Reacting to what they see as “po-faced” indie bands earnestly shuffling the same post-punk influences, this New Cross trio revive long-banished memories of early- 1990s dance at its daftest.

Where acid house was built from soulful foundations, happy hardcore revelled in rapid rhythms, cheesy piano breaks and vocals snatched from children’s television programmes. Getting the group together, chief Klaxon Jamie Reynolds had the bonkers idea of covering The Bouncer, by Kicks Like a Mule — a one-hit wonder based on a doorman’s refrain, “Your name’s not down, you’re not coming in” — as a manic guitar number. Amazingly, his bass-playing makes it an absolute riot.

Seen live, they’re like a college prank that’s assumed a life of its own. “If you strip down old rave tracks, they’re essentially incredibly melodic pop songs,” James Righton, the singer/keyboardist, has theorised. In practice, that means Klaxons come over as a mouthier McFly pretending to be the Prodigy. Along with their recent tour-mates Shit Disco (the sound of a punch-up in a Glasgow squat) and Datarock (funkadelic Norwegians in tracksuits), they might have the attitude of rave, but otherwise it’s just a visual pun — they’re a band with instruments, not a DJ with a record bag.

Fifteen years ago, rave caused moral panic. John Major worried that the nation’s youth was leaving an important part of its brain somewhere in a field in Hampshire. At home as a West Country teenager, when my largest tribal gathering was the still annual Dorset Steam Fair, I squirmed through an episode of Casualty where “party-goers” were trapped in a burning barn. (That’ll teach them!) My raving had to wait until I was a poncy student. Flashbacks then involved dancers on stilts in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, though not the infamous Castlemorton. The scene’s high noon, in May 1992, it prompted the government to outlaw unlicensed “repetitive beats” under the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.

Despite reckless comments by Reynolds and co, new rave is hardly the Peaches Geldof generation proclaiming “Everything begins with an E”. In its mainstream guise, it seems more a chance to accessorise. At last month’s London gig, I heard a Klaxons fan say she’d spent seven quid on smiley badges. To be fair, the band conceived new rave for a laugh, wanting to create “the most short-lived genre of all time”.

Musically, these groups aren’t regurgitated rave but another bash at indie-dance, which also took off in the early 1990s. Call me an old grump, but none of the new ravers can yet hold a glowstick to the efflorescence of 1989-91. Heralded by New Order’s Ibiza album, Technique, and culminating with Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, that was a period when anything seemed possible (and, given Shaun Ryder’s celebrity, clearly was).

Where does that leave new rave’s flag-bearers? Well, Screamadelica’s success was largely due to its producer, Andrew Weatherall, ripping up the rulebook, so much hangs on the knob-twiddling of the Klaxons’ producer, James Ford. But I can’t see his charges matching Screamadelica on their hotly anticipated album, Myths of the Near Future. Meanwhile, for an authentically revivalist choon, check out Ford’s Simian Mobile Disco remix of Magick. A hands-in-the-air homage to Orbital, it’s a reminder of hazy dawns when we thought we didn’t need guitars to make some noise.

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