Seeing Gogol Bordello live is like stepping into some great big Bar Mitzvah party gone bad.

The accordions are going, frontman Eugene Hutz is half-naked, shouting "hei, hei" in his thick Slavic accent, and there is more Russian dancing than in a production of Fiddler On The Roof.

For those who don't know, Gogol Bordello are a bunch of New York-based gipsy punks formed by Hutz two decades after Chernobyl forced him to flee his native Ukraine.

Hutz has been hailed as the Ukranian Iggy Pop but the truth is more like Sascha Baron Cohen's creation Borat.

"He-yellow" and shouts of "revolution" is about all the small talk he afforded the crowd before launching into songs about crazy old ladies wearing purple - the hideously catchy Start Wearing Purple - and dictators' day out Mussolini v Stalin.

With his gold medallion, pasty flesh and huge moustache, Hutz looks like something from a cheap Eastern European porno movies and he knows it.

If New York hadn't found this Ukranian vagabond we'd be watching Antoine de Caunes introducing him on an episode of Eurotrash.

Two scantily-clad gipsy girls helped Hutz ham it up for Through The Roof and Underground, but one and a half hours of virtually indecipherable gipsy punk later the talk was not about the music but Hutz's facial hair.

One man summed up the night better than any review: "That's some f***ing moustache".

I couldn't put it better myself.