Anxious that nothing should detract from the visceral power of their live shows - performances which have already led one critic to describe them as "the best band I've ever seen" - frontman Adrien Munden would "prefer it if you didn't mention that I used to be an actor".

But if Audioporn's melodramatic showmanship and spoken monologues don't give the game away tonight, their stage garb might - the band's live wardrobe consists largely of costumes nicked from the Royal Shakespeare Company, including a white fur coat once sported by the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

Having grown up obsessed with the likes of The Clash and Bowie, Munden insists he only got into acting in order to "get the money to buy a guitar".

It proved a solid game plan. While accompanying the RSC on their first ever tour of South Africa, he was offered a weekly slot at the national theatre, playing his songs in the bar and eventually winding up on TV. While others were setting their sights on Hamlet, Munden returned convinced he had to form a band.

So he teamed up with bassist Pete Coombs, drummer Che Albrington and keyboardist Simon Abbot and, sensing they weren't the only ones bored by "bands following the three-minute formula of verse, chorus, verse, middle eight", set about creating something that was "more of a performance, a slightly other world. Music with the balls of punk and the cleverness of that Seventies stuff".

The result is, to be frank, a concept album. But not in the sense of "pixies and fairies and wizards and goblins", and not in the sense of Mansun's The Attack Of The Grey Lantern (God rest its soul).

Played from start to finish, Tank is a sci-fi dub-rock opus which, in a bizarre collision of Beat poetry, Blur's Parklife and Charles Dickens, charts the journey of a tank - left to the hero in a will, uncovered in a cavernous underground warehouse and used, in the finale, to crush the TV sets children throw in its path.

It's conceptual for sure (unlike Super Furry Animals, Audioporn's tank is purely metaphorical). But it's done with sleazy panache, quirky danceability and lashings of dark humour.

"The record companies told us it was commercial suicide to do a concept album with no singles," says Munden.

"But we decided to throw the rule book away, to make something a bit cutting edge that wasn't pandering to the music industry. We made a big f*** off piece of art. And the minute we did that the world turned for us."

After witnessing the album's first play-through, Richard Daws of Komedia Entertainment took on the band's management. And now Audioporn are fresh from a tour with ex-Strangler Hugh Cornwell, set to play Glastonbury's Lost Vagueness, and working on their first DVD. Alongside footage of tonight's gig, it will include an album trailor, filmed in Brighton, which takes the form of a fake documentary and includes a scene of Munden "skateboarding down rolling hills wearing a white boiler suit with UN written on it."

There's no denying Audioporn are clever little so-and-sos. But we'd advise you simply to kick back and enjoy the ride. After tonight, Audioporn will be as big a secret as that mag under your mattress.

Starts at 7pm. Tickets £6/£7, call 01273 709709.

Take your copy of today's Argus to either the Dome, Komedia or Spiegeltent box offices and you can claim two Audioporn tickets for the price of one.