You would surely have forgiven Sparks if the stage at the Islington Academy had an autocue monitor secreted among the equipment. Similarly, it seemed amazing that tapes playing backing tracks were forsaken for an actual live band. After all, stop to consider the memory-straining logistics of performing every album of a 36-year back catalogue on successive nights, and the mind boggles. In the case of pop's original odd couple, Russell and Ron Mael, that amounts to 250-odd songs spread across 21 albums, up to and including their freshly minted opus Exotic Creatures of the Deep.

Of course, in terms of popularity, any band's history is an undulating terrain. Forthcoming performances of albums such as Balls (1997) and (the wonderful) Whomp That Sucker (1981) have yet to sell out, but this performance of the group's 1974 classic Kimono My House was always going to be a hot ticket. After all this time, the glam-dram landslide of its signature hit, This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us, has lost none of its impact. Neither, it seems, has the Tigger- like Russell Mael's ability to be physically consumed by the rollcall of surreal images summoned by his brother's words.

It helped that Ron and Russell had enlisted a young, hungry band who made light work of replicating that thunder of “stampeding rhinos, elephants and tacky tigers”. You wondered what role they might find themselves playing in a few nights, when it's time to perform the arpeggiating electropop of No 1 in Heaven - but for this performance they tempered Russell Mael's poperatic semi-falsetto with a necessary, elemental bombast.

For a brief period in history, there was nothing to choose between Sparks and Queen - both new bands who burnt down a bold path between earthy riffing and erudite high camp. The vertiginous descending chords of Thank God It's Not Christmas reminded you why only one of those bands went on to pack stadiums. Indeed, that Queen later had a hit with Thank God It's Christmas somehow says it all.

But for those gathered at this show - many of whom had season tickets that allowed them into all 21 nights - that intensified the bond. Save for Barbecutie - the original B-side of This Town... - there were no encores. Under such circumstances, though, who would have dared accuse them of laziness?

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