When people tell you the early-80's were rubbish for music they are lying. Pretentious, synthetic and possessed of the worst haircuts known to man maybe, but hell, rather that than the workaday blokishness of Coldplay anytime.

North London's Nemo are here to put the preposterous back into pop. You just know what's in store when they arrive onstage in matching sci-fi tunics. When the bubbling keyboards wade in and singer James Cook starts jerking mechanically and cutting ludicrous shapes the picture is complete: Nemo are Devo, OMD and Talking Heads all rolled into one.

They've obviously worshipped at the alter of Bowie and played air-synth along to their secret collection of obscure Berlin Blondes singles and then wondering why no-one acts like proper pop stars anymore. So Nemo have tweaked the blueprint, added a sprinkle of 21st century guitar fuzz and left their sense of cool at home for the night.

Songs like 'Memory Box' and 'My Alibi' (a dead ringer for 'The Red Guitars' classic 'Good Technology') don't sound modern so much as simply out of time, like an old sci-fi B-movie that got it all so heroically wrong. Laugh all you like at their theatrical folly, but Nemo's retro-futurist submarine is surfacing and it might just save us all.

Ronan Munro 'NME'

Aah, the pleasure of seeing a band grow before your very eyes! Nemo's first outing was a quirky, puzzling affair with only a modicum of attitude. Tonight however there's a new confidence and vigour on display, which makes things crackle and shine. Also the bass and drums are whacked up full which always helps. Imagine Kraftwerk after a fortnight's holiday around Camden's post-Britpop watering holes. Imagine The Human League with guitars. This is Nemo. A band with song titles like Living Room and Memory Box. Backed by a post-modern slideshow (cigarette butts, Roger Moore's chin and kitsch dot patterns, you get the drift) and decked out in uniform fawn utility jackets, they staunchly peddle their grandiose themes. It works. Keyboards swirl, guitars distort and drone, and the off-kilter choruses mug us. The live wire front man's been brushing up his mock irony; "you can clap now," and "thanks for being so enthusiastic" he teases between songs. His dreaming soul has grand designs, and on 'Living Room' his falsettos point the way forward. On 'Rescue The Revolution' the sex-o-meter bounces up to the red when they launch into the Stranglers-type section of discord and more 80's keyboard stabs add succour. It's a sonically economic and uplifting neon highway Nemo are treading. A road laid by the likes of Mr. Almond and Sir Oakey who look down from the scuffed pages of 80's heaven and say 'grow Nemo, grow!'

BB 'Fly Magazine'

Like four rogue Thunderbird characters with their strings cut, Nemo burst into life. All dressed in C&A summer coats, they could be mistaken for looking like the schoolboy version of Kraftwerk, but happily for the energetic club crowd, they deliver something more than the musical equivalent to paint drying. It would be too easy to say that Nemo could be described as a cross between the vocal of Divine Comedy and the sound of Pulp and therefore I won't. Suffice to say this no bad thing and they do what they do very well, almost a little too well. Some rough edges on an unsigned up and coming band can sometimes create that sense of intensity which gets you noticed by the people that count.

Within twenty minutes, they had punched out four or five well rounded, polished tunes, but nothing to stick in my 'Bud' - addled brain. The strengths in Nemo's set can be found in the simple things they did. Great little sample loops which seemed to almost introduce most of their tunes, strong lyrics delivered competently, but nothing they produced could hold my attention for very long and no one memory has lingered particularly long in mind. The one exception I felt was Memory Box. Is this the all-allusive single? Could Nemo make it in the current musical mist enveloping the apathetic scene? Why not? They've got something, it's just not a something you'll find in my record collection, but keep an eye and ear out for this band.

Lester Keates 'Fly Magazine'

The next step is the support act, Nemo. All in red and black, they overwhelm the stage with a hyperactive and ostensibly electro hybrid of the finest moments of Pulp and the most tuneful and sing-along aspects of early Blur. Singer James reels around as though under the influence of some kind of narcotic pulse, slapping at his head and at one point launching himself off the stage into the bemused audience. He just about regains his poise, never missing a fractured note. It is the melodies that bring the whole thing together. The new single 'Piccadilly' is an undeniable anthem, and the manifesto of the group reaches its nadir in the stunning 'Living Room', which closes the set in a style by which they WILL be remembered.

Nightshift Magazine

Okay, listen up. Starting a band? Then hear this: cloning - bad; vast gene pool - good. Photocopy - bad; collage with paint - good. Get my drift? One influence - bad; two dozen influences, plus a 100% of your personality, experience and emotion - good. Let's start getting it right, or we're going to lose even more venues. One band understands this tonight, the others don't.

Thank heavens for Nemo. Citrus fresh, feisty and urban, this four piece London crew, like their recent touring partners Clearlake, have drunk deep from the essence of British pop history and are set up in the vanguard of audio terrorism that this moribund island needs.

Centred around wired up singer James Cook, a glorious cross between John Foxx, Phil Daniels and a purple hearted buzzed up Scott Walker, their minidisced core is a late 70s electro-pop (not the camp, Romo-ed early 80s stuff). The kind early Ultravox produced after late nights in Conny Plank's studios in Germany, but in Nemo's hands - and here's the twist - shot through with a big Mod soul, then packed into one explosive, soaring firework along with Berlin-era Bowie, OMD, Pulp, Eno and an even longer list, liable to get edited. Potential singles like 'Memory Box', 'Living Room' and 'Rescue The Revolution' are performed with a machined passion and style long since missed from the scene, but with enough rugged drumming and bass to quell any 'Retro Fears Two'. Lie a moment of being, they are the past, the present, the bright dancing future and most of all themselves rolled into one. It's the organic evolution and sincerity that means Nemo will go a long way. The time is just right for them.

Paul Carrera 'Nightshift Magazine'

Once in a while a band from far, far away descends on one of our friendly hostelries and charms the pants off the locals long before the rest of the nation has even woken up to their existence. It happened with Carter USM and rather more recently with Ultrasound and Beulah. Could Nemo be next in line? Their last visit to the Bully back in July certainly had a few regular local gig goers in a bit of a fluster, so there's every chance. Hailing from one of London's less glamorous enclaves and taking their cue from early 80s pop protagonists like The Human League and OMD as well as the likes of Pulp and adding a dash of cabaret style Nemo seem to fit, square peg in a round hole - ike, into that same skewed world as the likes of Blue Apple Boy, where guitars and synthesizers and lo-fi attitude mesh oddly to make for a quite lovable brand of quirky noise. It's still very early days for Nemo as yet - a mere dozen gig's old at most- but that recent showing illustrated that the tide is turning against dour secure indie rock and back in favour of the weirdoes. So an early viewing is certainly called for.

Nightshift Magazine

One of literature's most misunderstood anti-heroes, Captain Nemo, lived for noble purposes. He saw the evil in mankind and the destruction it couldn't help itself from dealing upon the world and chose to fight back. Sort of the prototype for Greenpeace direct action campaigners, but with a heavily armed futuristic submarine.

As such, Nemo is an appropriate name for tonight's band. They are seeking to take pop back, not to a gentler age, but to a wiser time in an attempt to drag it's bloated corpse into the future. And they've got a heavily armed catalogue of super cool influences to back them up.

As with the best of the later New-Wave bands to whom they look to for inspiration, Nemo rest their sound on a solid synthetic base but never let it totally dominate. Instead guitars and bass weave the hum and crackle of digital technology so that songs like 'Memory Box' while on one level sounds ike it's been patched in from 1980, finally emerges from it's time tunnel, as at home in the 21st Century as anywhere in time. The band themselves, forever contorting like robot puppets, look like Thunderbirds gtting the funk.

Pitched somewhere between Devo, New Order, The Red Guitars and OMD, Nemo are still one small ripple on a British underground pop scene that is pig sick of marketing over imagination every time. They are part of a nebulous scene that has fallen beneath the radar of both the national music press and everyone other than the smallest of independent record labels.

Their time may yet come though. Tonight in front of no more than a dozen people, they ooze class. From such murky depths true pop anti-heroes can rise.

John Leeson 'Nightshift Magazine'

After a cancellation, it was down to Nemo to open the night. The over confident front man strutted his stuff, and aired his characteristic irony to match. Comments such as "You Can Clap Now" entertained some of the audience, whilst grating others. When asked who got laid at school, or after school, the otherwise appreciative audience became suddenly silent, quiet, and when no response came he sulked like a school kid, stating that he wouldn't tell the story of the song to come. Despite his reaction, the crowd stayed cosily gathered around to listen appreciatively, some clearly having seen them before, singing along, whilst others applauded and could not help but tap their feet. Perhaps this wasn't enough for the band, who to go out with a bang, threw glasses of beer into the middle of the floor, as though as a large stadium gig, prompting the crowd to follow suit. The irony in the attitude was entertaining, and clearly a stunt rather than purposeful, however this was unnecessary as the music provided the entertainment needed. Think eighties synthesiser music with guitars and personal lyrics, such as on "Actions" and you have Nemo.

Katherine Tomlinson

Born in 1999, Nemo came together through the shared love of electronic pop and new-wave. Inspired by the likes of Joy Division, Television, Human League and Talking Heads, James Cook, Milan Adamik and the man known as Section Q took what they did best as a platform for seeing what comes next. Pushing off from this oft imitated history they’ve created a genre unto themselves. Despite a whack-load of buzzy attention last year, ‘internal conflicts’ meant that things were starting to look a little grim. And then along came Kev Kennedy, a fantastic multi-talented guitarist. They met at Kinki, a retro futurist club in Soho in May. It was love at first sight.

Tonight’s show is their first gig since Kev’s induction into the fold. You’d think that combined with the bias to the left (right-hand PA blown during the soundcheck; James’ collarbone injury two days before) would make them even a little apprehensive, and if any anxiety remains it immediately dissipates the second they hit the stage. James’ punky cabaret vocals and intense smirk have the aching ability to leave his audience gasping; his egregious flair for knowing what his audience wants both disarming and intoxicating. The bass and drums from Milan and Section Q send the heart reeling in an aural beat-down, while Kev’s sweet guitar and pretty little harmonies sets the room alight. Theirs is a brand of postmodern looping sci-pop that infiltrates the body with exacting inebriation, burlesque glam and glippy space-pops hurtle about propelled by unparalleled voltage.

The pop-y electro-jangle of 'Living Room' sets it up with sing-back choruslines, thumping basslines and James raving gleefully at centre stage; their methedrine energy cleaves the room with head-spinning ferocity. 'The Colour of Sound' dances in hues, starry 'Signals' hum and gash in a tumultuous seduction accompanied all the while by quantum pop and glammed up space blips. By 'Masters of Disguise' their proclivity for the synthtastic is luminescent. With a bit of more traditional keyboards, the thudding graze of bass and drums clash in a precise waltz with nigh-on angry vocals. It’s a much harsher number, set in immediate juxtaposition to high-string glitzy synth. James’ droning scream arcs above it all before seething into nothing. From the gloriously retroglam of 'Rescue the Revolution' to the hauntingly, almost Triffidianly, postapocalyptic and glitchy Piccadilly in Sepia, Nemo is nothing short of dirty sophistication that will threaten your sanctity and fill you with ecstasy.

****Chris Corner of the Sneaker Pimps is mixing their new single, a double A-side single of The Colour of Sound and Rescue, release date tba.

Emma Haigh

Nemo have changed guitarists since the last time I saw them and it proves to be a change for the better: the new guy moves around the stage, totally into the sound and boosting the band's energy. There are only a couple of songs I recognise from a couple of years back, with Living Room being the only disappointment: for some the guitar is totally consumed by the backing track, giving none of the old dynamic when the heavy chorus riffs kick in. The rest of the set showcases a more 'post-punk' sound from the band, with jagged start stop sounds and a greater use of distorted guitar. Lifespan sounds particularly good with Milan swapping bass for deep sounding keyboard that attacks and crouches over with gusto. Front man James' capering still flips into the absurd, with him leaving the stage twice for a song's intro so he can run on in time to start the song, but I guess that goes with the job.

TheoGB