As we arrive, we hear the retro-heartbroken strains of Gentle Ben and His Sensitive Side’s Summertime – quite fitting in that ascending the stairs to the Zoo in January is of course like stepping into an ocean of warm piss. Hearing the song is also a worry, as it’s a longer one and we can subsequently bet our late arses that we’ve arrived at least in the middle of the set for them to be playing it. Indeed, they started at 8:45 and we’re here at 9:10 and we thought we’d be early.

Anyway, The Dogs of Valparaiso is still like having a bucket of sheeps’ eyes thrown at you while on an acid trip, just after you took three points and fell through some rotten floorboards in the old haunted taverna. Ben Corbett regularly does a flamenco dance at the end of Spell of the Moon and should therefore know by now to source two handsome dark-haired women who could come out and place some kind of acoustically enhanced platform on the stage – so we can all appreciate the sex code he stomps out like a great big hyper-extended black scorpion. Grrrr. But he doesn’t. Looks good though.

Former Afghan Whigs resident Mussolini and all around young Orson Welles ego rival Greg Dulli is like an arrogant boulder used to being worshipped by native peoples. The Twilight Singers’ set starts with the openers from Powder Burns: Towards the Waves and I’m Ready, but with a gargantuan force-ten of spirit unmatched on the recording. They create a cyclone of stadium rock in a half filled Zoo; there’s all this air whooshing from the guitars – I think I see John Travolta trying to fly one. According to the research, this kind of rock is a high-pressure method boys in pain use to wash off dry blood.

There seems to be no barrier or struggle between source emotion and song for Dulli – he’s a straight gunshot of formidable articulation, and perhaps this is why some throw their hands in the air in grudging submission. For if the creation of the songs bears no problems, it is on and on he must go – and he does. It is this sheer force and speed at which he travels that has us stuck to the walls as he spins us around that evil, shrunken, ‘seen it all’ little core he calls a heart.

When Mark Lanegan surfaces it’s a relief because watching Dulli is so demanding the way he must blast through into extremis with every move. He’d be such a fucker of a housemate. You’d buy him a carton of beer just so he’d pass out and you could smother him. Even dead he wouldn’t shut up. Lanegan by contrast is darker, heavier and fascinatingly still. Now he’d make you secret concoctions at midnight and spot you foreign cigarettes whilst telling you in a growly, barely awake voice a range of almost catatonic anecdotes of enlightened destitution after very bad breakups from drug-dependent relationships. He fronts a cover of Massive Attack’s Live with Me, and does an absolute pants-disturbing rendition of I’ll Take Care of You. He’s not a flighty one and there are women fanning their faces and indicating it’s now because of him and not the ridiculous temperature.

The band comes back for not so much an encore but another show. It’s really great – but also like when your cousin brings out ‘the special bottle’ of grog at 4am when everyone else thought it was safe to go to bed. Well worth it though if only for a windy and eerily paced cover of Bruce Springsteen’s I’m On Fire – fitting well with Dulli’s panoramic rock aspirations. But when he sings: “It’s like someone took a knife baby edgy and dull / and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my soul…” you can just bet he not only admires Springsteen for writing it (almost like a freaking normal person), but observing Dulli, he probably wants to kill The Boss too. It’s this ‘it’s-all-mine!’ vibe about him that sorta wears thin after a while, even if he is really good. But he’s just such a quintessential expired coke mine – bet he’d try and pash peoples’ mums.