It’s not often these days I go to a gig in a steamy basement and feel young. But at Billy Childish, I felt like a spring chicken in comparison to the seasoned gig-goers around me.

Well, until the band came on, that is. Even though he makes a virtue of his advancing years, by pop standards, Billy Childish and his band The Musicians Of The British Empire clearly have enough energy and enthusiasm to outdo others many years younger.

From the moment Billy, his bass-playing wife Nurse Julie and drummer Wolf Howard took to the stage, he had everyone in the jam-packed venue enthralled.

After asking for the lights to be turned up so he could see the spots on his guitar (he claimed he wasn’t joking), Billy launched into the first of a set filled with sweet and simple punk, surf guitar, blues and good old rock ’n’ roll.

The band’s tour comes after the release last month of Archive From 1959 – The Billy Childish Story, a 51-track retrospective of his musical career, which started with punk garage band The Pop Rivets. Songs from that album included Christmas 1979 and What’s Wrong With Me.

Other highlights included a jaunty a capella version of traditional Gospel song John The Revelator, and Joe Strummer’s Grave from 2007’s Punk Rock at the British Legion Hall, which Billy introduced by reciting these lyrics, read from a scrappy piece of paper: “Cool Britannia, Jesus saves/ Rupert Murdoch rules the waves/Richard Branson doesn’t shave/and Joe Strummer’s laughing in his grave.”

An encore later and we were stumbling upstairs into the chill of Brighton seafront, thoroughly garage-rocked out.