I had to pinch myself once or twice when I saw that New Jersey’s finest Dalek were to play in London’s most famous hip-hop venue, erm, The Borderline. While I was ordering my pre-show Courvoisier, I noticed a few mementos behind the bar celebrating visits by a load of other leading rappers – The Wonderstuff, Suzi Quattro et al.

The ludicrously-pierced young man (now I know where they got their inspiration for that “B of the bang” statue that sits near Manchester City’s stadium) who was near me was equally perplexed by the support band Guapo. “I came here to see hip-hop, not this post-nugaze bollocks”, he volunteered, kindly helping me with out with some sort of description of this oddest of bands, even if I haven’t the foggiest idea what he meant. They had matching sparkly outfits to co-ordinate with their proggy excesses – big fuzzy bass, tinkly Herbie Hancock Rhodes, metal riffs, and a gong (of course they had a gong). When they reined in their ambition a little, as they did towards the end of their set which featured droning guitar and simple keyboard figures over some sort of jerky fractured loop, they were pleasingly effective.

Dalek’s two-piece backing band, the unnecessarily aggressively-named Destructo Swarmbots, worked up some atmospheric layers for ten minutes from effect-laden guitar and laptop, and in doing so worked up my metal-faced friend into even more of a tizzy – until Oktopus placated him by coming on stage and switching the beat on. Dalek hauled his considerable girth onto the stage as the howl swirled around him, and began to mesh his apocalyptic rhyming into the mix whilst prowling the stage like a caged animal driven close to psychosis.

The music was as blazingly experimental as you would expect from Dalek, whose Myspace page lists their influences as “Mobb Deep, My Bloody Valentine, Public Enemy, Sonic Youth, EPMD, Faust, Last Poets, Lee “Scratch” Perry, King Tubby, Bad Brains, Flying Saucer Attack, Grandmaster Flash, KRS-One, Black Flag, Gang Starr, Iannis Xenakis, Godflesh, Penderecki, Cocteau Twins, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Glenn Branca, etc”. Etc? As in “and others of that ilk”? It takes a special mind to view these artists as being in some way homogenic, but when you hear Dalek perform it all makes perfect sense. Drones would ascend to cacophonous crescendos and drop out to vocals and thunderous beats as if it was the most normal thing in the world. It isn’t. No-one else does it quite like this.

I could just about delineate some choice cuts from last year’s brilliant Abandoned Language album amongst the intense wall of noise, including a coruscating “Bricks Crumble”. However despite the familiarity of the material, and the sheer brilliance of the delivery, the knowledgeable crowd in this Crucible Theatre of hip-hop seemed strangely hard to excite. After an intense finale which featured the guitarist swishing his sweaty locks like he was playing for Slayer, and after a mere forty minutes, Dalek was off, and a disappointingly lacklustre crowd was never going to entice him back on stage.