Pop’s original odd couple, Alison Moyet and Vince Clarke played their first British show together for 26 years in Glasgow on Wednesday. Emerging from the same fertile Basildon scene that spawned Clarke’s first band, Depeche Mode, Yazoo enjoyed huge but short-lived success in the early 1980s. They disbanded after two albums and just a handful of live shows. Moyet then launched a high-profile solo career while Clarke struck chart gold again with Erasure.

They may currently live on different continents, but the duo’s Basildon bond remains intact. Performing on a minimalist stage of high-tech steel and neon, the 46-year-old Moyet slipped easily into turbo-throated blues-diva mode, while the 47-year-old Clarke remained comically motionless and poker-faced behind his computer screen. Beth Ditto’s mouthy Essex auntie meets a one-man-band version of Kraftwerk. Mr Chalk meets Mrs Cheese. However unlikely the chemistry, it still works.

The lively Glasgow crowd, mostly fortysomething couples, came to party. Many stood up in their seats for the entire show, screaming requests or declarations of love at Moyet. In between slower, sadder tunes such as Nobody’s Diary and Winter Kills, they were rewarded with strident blasts of classic hi-NRG disco that turned this plush auditorium into a throbbing gay club.

At around 80 minutes, this was a compact show, but understandably so given the duo’s slender back catalogue. They could perhaps have expanded the set with cover versions or even new compositions. But other than a mid-set instrumental played on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, they played it straight.

That said, there was little self-consciously retro about Wednesday’s performance. Clarke has unobtrusively retooled the band’s music for the digital age, making their vintage 1980s synthesizer ditties sound crisp, fluid and timeless.

Predictably, Yazoo saved their biggest and best-known hits, Don’t Go and Only You, for the finale. The former, a beefy techno-pop stomp with a dark heart of bluesy despair, sounded pristine and muscular. The latter, with its gently cascading keyboard melody and mournful vocal, is a hardly perennial that remains one of the greatest debut singles in British pop history. Clarke and Moyet may be a minor sideshow in this era of overhyped rock reunions, but their odd-couple charm has not faded.

Tour continues: tomorrow, Manchester Apollo; Mon, Sheffield City Hall; Wed, Nottingham Royal Concert Hall; Thur, Wolverhampton Civic Hall; June 13, Bristol Colston Hall; June 15, Brighton Centre; June 16, Plymouth Pavilions; June 18 & 19, Hammersmith Apollo, London W6 .

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