Cornershop, scala, London

Strolling to the Scala as Cornershop strike up a rolling, sunny groove on the stage feels like entering a mod movie set, a 21st century, streamlined version of a swinging Sixties club scene.

It's an energising mood Tjinder Singh's band have become increasingly adept at in their haphazard 10-year existence. Astutely entering the public consciousness by hijacking an NME campaign against Morrissey's alleged racist leanings in 1992, the shambolic records and gigs that followed had only fragments of ideas to recommend them, inciting angry scenes from crowds who felt they'd been scammed.

But Cornershop proved a rare example of a band taking punk's "anyone can do it" ethos (which they traced back to Victorian seizer of art's means of production, William Morris) not as an invitation to permanent incoherent amateurism, but as an opportunity for studied self-improvement. By the third album, I Was Born for the 7th Time (1997), and the next year's smash single, "Brimful of Asha", Singh had become a self-sufficient producer of multicultural funk. The mostly tremendous upcoming album, Handcream for a Generation, reinforces these lessons: it is the hopeful sound of one Britain under a groove.

Singh's personal performance methods, though, take much more getting used to. While the current six-piece Cornershop are arrayed around him, filling the stage with lively movement and Handcream for a Generation's bright new sounds, Singh simply stands, and vaguely sings. It looked like nerves, or the old charge of incompetence: now, I suppose it's a technique. In a dark pin-striped suit, his arms stay pinned to his side, and his mumbling, conversational voice sometimes strays from the mic. He looks like he's been ordered to sing by an eerie outside force, and is trying to resist. Though far more assured than four years ago, he looked like a shop-window mannequin.

Cornershop would be a different band, and this a far more powerful gig, if it wasn't for Singh's central, static absence. As they shake their instruments instead of striking them on "Sleep On the Left Side" and make "Brimful of Asha" spin on in a groove, instead of moving in the usual marching rock line, it's clear that they're capable of all the strange subtleties of their albums.

At the close, Handcream for a Generation's epic mantra "Spectral Morning" builds into something more lavish and daring, sampled funk soundtrack strings stabbing as guitars growl, while images of cosmic birth screen. Singh just looks lost in thought. They would still be great background music to that club I imagined as I entered. But as a band to shake you up by themselves, they lack a vital spark.