If you saw Ladytron at Concorde 2 earlier this year, you probably paused before buying your Goldfrapp tickets.

The four-piece plumb a similar vein in electronica to Goldfrapp but proved arch, highly-synthesised electro-pop doesn't always work live. Their gig was impressively unatmospheric.

Having heard Alison Goldfrapp's three albums, especially her latest, Supernature (2005), you might wonder how her synthesised, operatic vocals and the high artifice of such production-heavy sound might translate on stage.

Would it be Ladytron - or worse, Milli Vanilli - all over again?

At this sell-out gig, Brighton's fluffy-haired finest had turned out in force. The West Country girl strode on stage in silver platform boots, black bodystocking and crimson pleated cape.

Rather than a diminished performance, if anything, it was even better live than on CD.

With a wind machine whipping her frizzy, blonde mane into the air, she was like an urban, 21st-Century Earth mother.

Taking her cue from glam rock and high camp, early-Eighties synth-pop and passing it through the MDMA-saturated sieve of the last 20 years of dance music has given her a coolly refined sound.

Singing into voice-distorting mics and backed by keyboard, drums, two guitars and a DJ, it was as if the recording studio had never existed.

Her strong, at times theatrical, vocals, soared over the sub-disco beat.

For anyone bored by the lack of a messier bassline, there were dancing girls. Skirting close to Benny Hill in skimpy bikinis and wolf masks, the four dancers gave a human touch to the icy robotics of Strict Machine.

At one point, with La Goldfrapp thrumming her theremin off her upper thigh as the bikinied wolverines writhed on the floor, it could have been a Seventies progrock (or Spinal Tap) concert. (Will Gregory, looking like Jesus but in a silver Yamamoto smock and white platform boots, was already there.)

The tracks began to sound similar but there was just about enough up and down-beat variation, on-stage theatrics and conviction, to keep everyone happy - as happy as a lovelorn android wandering a dystopian landscape, that is.