Usually when old bands of a particular vintage come around to play again, there is a certain level of nudging and winking between those on stage and their audience. “We know we looked and sounded kind of daft all those years ago,” their demeanour implies, “but you were young with us, weren’t you? You understood what it was all about.”

Blue Oyster Cult’s knowing asides and smirking glances at each other indicate that they are all too aware of how open to parody they are. Their thinking must be: if anyone’s going to make money from it, it might as well be us.

It’s difficult to imagine when you look at the embarrassing richness of theme and genre in popular music today, but once Blue Oyster Cult were considered cutting-edge. Kind of like an American riposte to Black Sabbath, they married a few meaty guitar riffs to some luddite goth poetry and sold by the barrowload. Nice work if you can get it, but when does such youthful foolishness grow tired? Apparently never, at least for longtime Blue Oyster Cult members Eric Bloom, Allen Lanier and Buck Dharma (or Donald Roeser as his mother named him).

Another tacitly accepted truth of classic bands is that the most successful look least like their own road crew.

So, while you couldn’t imagine Paul McCartney or Mick Jagger getting their hands dirty, Bloom and Dharma are hard to distinguish from the guys tuning up onstage before they appear.

Only with their sunglasses on — The Ferry has exterior windows, but we’re hardly blinded by the glare — do the Cultists make a stab at adopting a rock-star persona. Their much younger bassist, Richie Castellano, follows their lead with the facial furniture and plays while wearing a retching expression that suggests he may have food lodged in his throat. Despite the urge to offer a Heimlich manoeuvre, his gurning, duckwalking enthusiasm is a nice balance to the elder members of the band’s seen-it-all-before nonchalance.

As for the music, it takes a sense of humour to appreciate. Then Came the Last Days of May, says Bloom,

is a true story about some guys from New York who rented a car and drove out west to buy some drugs. There, he says, they “met a fate they didn’t deserve”.

It’s an appropriately foreboding song, but with stumbling lyrics such as: “They all had the money they had/ Money they hoped would take them very far.”

This Ain’t the Summer of Love includes the line, “This ain’t the garden of Eden/There ain’t no angels above”, and it’s one of many references to angels, demons and fantastical tableaus that wouldn’t appear out of place in a Michael Moorcock novel.

For those not overly impressed by such dope-shrouded musings, the music outweighs the naff lyrics by at least a 2:1 ratio. That’s thanks to the customary five-minute guitar solo at the end of every other song, as Bloom and Castellano hilariously strafe the crowd with imaginary machine-gun fire from their instruments. Truly, Blue Oyster Cult world is a boy’s playground.

Still, Godzilla is at least meant to be humorous — with its meaty “there goes Tokyo” chorus — while the obligatory (Don’t Fear) The Reaper was Blue Oyster Cult’s one stumble across a great song.

In the pompously titled Golden Age of Leather, however, another dodgy lyric stands as the most revealing: “Raise your can of beer on high/And seal your fate forever/Our best years have passed us by/The golden age of leather.” I’ll drink to that.

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette