Killing Joke @ 02ABC, 12 March

Nothing could stop this gig being a triumph: not support band The Icarus Line's petulant crowd-baiting and latter-day attempts to fuse Primal Scream with emo, not even the fact that the concert finished early due to a power cut. Tonight the original incarnation of Killing Joke proved themselves a formidable force with undiminished passion.

Youth strode back and forth across the stage, trading his thunderous bass licks with Geordie's pounding, chopped guitar riffs (how does he get that sound from a Rickenbacker?). Paul Ferguson's drums came on like a torrent, an on-rushing avalanche. And in front of it all, the near-mythic figure of Jaz Coleman, perhaps the last and greatest rock star of the modern era, possessed with a luminous, righteous self-belief: feeding off the adoration of the crowd and magnifying it, accelerating it.

Highlights: the raw power of Asteroid with every single fan screaming the chorus; Change, transformed from a post-punk jangle to a juddering, commanding slab of industrial metal; the thrilling, almost operatic performance Coleman gave on Absolute Dissent. This was rock music as important, political, capable of seismic social change. This was rock music before it fell terminally in love with its own haircut (The Icarus Line, I'm looking at you). Killing Joke delivered the mother of all shows: by turns military, industrial and complex.