Sean Guthrie's verdict: four stars

Outside, the night is dank and it's a midweek one to boot. Inside, support band Eagulls' anachronistic Killing Joke/PiL stylings are doing little to banish the gloom.

Can canny pop strategist Alex Kapranos and his thematically attired crew confound the omens and bring the light of weekend hedonism - their stock-in trade - to the Barrowland?

Judging by the consistently elated response of the crowd, the answer is: hell yeah. It might not be party central but it's as good as, given the circumstances. Franz Ferdinand's is celebratory music, and this is its spiritual home.

Across 100 minutes that draw on their four albums (a blur of songs so succinct they breeze through 20 before the hour mark) the quartet's union of singalong chants and loose funk - Status Quo meets A Certain Ratio, conceptually if not sonically - proves heady.

Populist but smart newer cuts such as Evil Eye, Fresh Strawberries and Love Illumination go down a storm, but unsurprisingly it's Take Me Out, whose riveting intro remains one of the rawest in 21st-century pop, that draws the greatest response.

Only twice do Franz Ferdinand deviate from the script: first by welding Donna Summer's I Feel Love to their own Can't Stop Feeling, then later for a four-man assault on Paul Thomson's drum kit. Otherwise it's like facing a Gatling gun loaded with party tunes.

If only it was the weekend.