Gerard Langley could have been in America last week, playing at the South By South West music festival with a pickup band including Peter Buck of REM on guitar.

Instead the Bristol-based beat poet was bringing The Blue Aeroplanes, his Eighties indie rock band, out of their hangar for the first time in five years.

Brighton was only the second stop on the Aeroplanes' flight around the UK to promote new album Altitude and the recent re-release of their early-Nineties classic, Swagger.

The band - a collective with, at last count, more than 29 members past and present - was, for purists, at slightly less than full strength, with only three guitarists and without Wotjek, their dancer.

Langley neverless showed why the Aeroplanes' idiosyncratic style and brilliant, chiming riffs brought them so close to the coolly unsought-after big time.

Looking like a cross between Jack Nicholson and Van Morrison, he delivered a glistening version of Yr Own World, the driving funk of ...and Stones and The Applicant - the Sylvia Plath poem set to music - with evident enjoyment.

"I rock," he announced with humility as if he'd just realised it, with a self-deprecatory wave of the hand.