When nostalgia becomes uber-cool there are only two possible explanations: the world has taken leave of its senses or you’ve gotten old enough that the hip kids are into what you were, “back in the day”. Of course it could be that there is a connection between the two, and so it seems with the revival of early 1980s cultural and musical styles.

That such a conflation has caught the eye of the Sydney Festival’s ever-trendy curators suggests that – œ80s nostalgia is now acceptably chic. Promisingly, the Festival’s paean to the emergence of post-punk and new wave aesthetics, Circa 1979: Signal To Noise, included a Beck’s Festival Bar event featuring seminal Australian electronic act Severed Heads as well as Australian rockers The Reels.

But what to expect on such a night? Should the artists mine their early achievements, reproduce them precisely for their old fans and newer converts eagerly replaying their – œbest-of’ compilations on iTunes? Or should they reinterpret their material for a new era, perhaps even play entirely new compositions to show where they have been since the period under examination?

With local hero Mark Murphy laying down an uncharacteristically un-beatmatched but characteristically thoughtful selection of old indie favourites, it looked likely that the former approach was being pursued. Big hits like Talking Heads’ Road To Nowhere fit snugly alongside the dance-pop drama of Human League’s The Things That Dreams Are Made Of and surprise turns like The Waterboys’ Whole Of The Moon.

Then The Reels were up on stage and Dave Mason was half-jokingly announcing that his band, reformed since 2007, had only been given permission to play its work from the 1979-85 period. They stuck to the formula, playing a slew of old favourites that were graciously lapped up by the very mixed-age audience. Their dig through the back catalogue included perennial favourite Quasimodo’s Dream, the reggae-flecked anti-Murdoch bounciness of After The News, Prefab Heart and an encore featuring an aching, if languid, rendition of Bad Moon Rising.

However, rather than the more angular, electro-pop-tinged material of their studio recordings, this was more, well, pub-rocky than I expected. Despite clearly bearing some of the ravages of age, the band managed to put a huge amount of heart into what it did. Yet with what they gave in enthusiasm and interest, The Reels couldn’t get there in terms of nailing the preciseness of their recordings. It was a loose set, held together by the goodwill on-stage and off, and at times threatening to take off—as when the sweet lilt of This Guy’s In Love pulled the audience into a unified sway.

After Mark Murphy provided another brief bridge with offerings from Siouxsie and The Smiths among others, it was time for the headliners (or really – œheadliner’ – Severed Heads being mainly Tom Ellard these days) to make an entrance. Suddenly an old-school ABC-TV test pattern illuminated the video screens, and it seemed that we were in for another time-shift to relive former glories.

Instead this was a schizophrenic performance, with much enjoyment and flashes of brilliance but a focus torn between old and new, leaving an unsatisfying whole. The visuals clearly won over the music, a clever mixture of re-edits and retreads of old material combined with some new but decidedly rave-era-styled computer animation that was both hypnotic and unsettling. Severed Heads was always a political band, carrying its messages on the back an experimental, art-school bravado.

But the sound was too often flat, as if Ellard was looking to rip the musicality from the early Severed Heads aesthetic to leave its beat- and noise-laden architecture standing naked. And Ellard’s always-interesting voice lacked the punch needed to enrich these new arrangements. There were classics like Oblique Firefly Overlocker, Big Car and We Have Come To Bless This House, but most of the tracks he played were apparently of quite recent vintage. Even when Dead Eyes Opened finally burst forth, it was again stripped of the hooks that made it a classic.

Thankfully, former Cabaret Voltaire member Stephen Mallinder was on hand to DJ through to the end, and from the half-hour I heard before I had to leave, he was delivering. It’s hard to go wrong when you play classics like David Byrne & Brian Eno’s Jezebel Spirit.

This was a night that seemed unsure of what it was about: recreating a past era, merely celebrating it, or showing us how things have moved on. All three were on show but they remained disaggregated, hinting at their potential but never quite coming together. It was not a bad gig (far from it, it was fun and brought a diverse audience warmly together), but it fell frustratingly short.