Jamelia, Leas Cliff Hall, Folkestone<br></br>The Hives, Electric Ballroom, London

Bladder Weakness and Reading Glasses. You can learn a lot about a town by the racks which Boots The Chemist gives priority floorspace, just inside the front door. Folkestone is a town which seems, literally, to be dying. Legions of bewildered over-65s stumble aimlessly around and electrified shopping buggies outnumber automobiles. Everything, from the poorly-painted wooden signs on the shop fronts to the funfair which, on one of the hottest days of the year, is inexplicably closed, has an air of resigned, pessimistic temporariness. This is, to paraphrase Morrissey, the seaside town that they remembered to shut down.

And yet, step inside the Leas Cliff Hall, a beautiful Victorian venue perched atop the white chalk escarpment, and you'll suddenly see an unexpected site: hundreds of young people, at least 95 per cent of them female. Jamelia Davis has, it seems, tapped into something.

The song which has made this connection isn't the peerless "Superstar" (of which, more shortly), but "Thank You", which bravely took the subject of domestic violence to number two in the charts. It's this song with which she makes her entrance tonight, silhouetted behind a white screen, one stilettoed foot turned sideways, casting a burlesque shadow.

Jamelia is, in the words of Mike Skinner, fit and she knows it: on the line "so damn sexy", she places one hand on her hip, winks and does a knowing shimmy. (She could, it must be said, do herself a favour by losing the baseball hat she sports for half the gig, and thereby look less like someone who ought to be asking you whether you want fries with that.) She won't thank me for the comparison, but Jamelia is essentially the Brummie Beyoncé, right down to the butt-centric video, featuring that outfit (a microdress with a red and black ra-ra hem), which has now become so iconic that she barely gets four songs into her set before stripping into a spangly version of it. The similarity becomes even more apparent when she plays "Drama" from her first album, drenched in then-vogueish Destiny's Child-style harpsichords.

Not that Jamelia is your average off-the-peg, character-free R&B robo-diva. Her persona is enjoyably bitchy, as typified by this lyric: "You need a couple nips and a tuck/ Plus a comb and a brush/ You need someone to drag your ass home in a rush/ Standing up in here like you're looking so plush/ Your mamma shoulda named you What The Fuck?" She's equally catty in real life, making undiplomatic remarks about her fellow Best British Female nominees (on Dido: "I suppose she's all right if you're trapped in a lift"). And some of her peers, it seems, admire her for it. Before the show, she receives a pair of fancy knickers from Kylie Minogue's personal designer range (although she doesn't have time to change into them: a conveniently positioned electric fan reveals white sports knickers of the type Bettie Stove might have worn in the 1977 Wimbledon Ladies' Final).

Having had her career put on hold after having a baby following her first hit "Money" (when she was just 18), this is quite a comeback for the 23-year-old. It's the opening night of her first real live tour, and she grins an "I can't believe this" grin throughout. Her second album, Thank You, is admirably varied, from Europop to Indian-influenced R&B, but a muddy sound-mix spoils the effect somewhat. She can, however, really sing, and even makes an eyebrow-raising cover of Linkin Park's "Numb" sound vaguely listenable. She encores, inevitably, with "Superstar", a Proper Hit Single which stayed in the charts for three months and won an Ivor Novello for Most-Performed Work. There's a sublime existential melancholy to its insistent synth groove, reminiscent of Kylie's "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" and Eighth Wonder's "I'm Not Scared". It sounds thoroughly northern European, and it comes as no surprise to see the Danish team of Hansen, Belmaati and Remee on the credits: this is Kierkegaard with a disco beat. And speaking of Scandies...

"The imminent return of The Hives is imminent no more... The Hives are back!" Howlin' Pelle Almqvist, the cartoon-arrogant circus ringmaster who, with The Darkness's Justin Hawkins, brought showmanship back to rock, is back on a stage for the first time in too long, staring and glaring, baring enamel and sclera, kicking be-spatted feet high into the air, and reminding us why his Hives were, not so long ago, Your New Favourite Band.

Having locked themselves away to record their fourth (but, to British ears, effectively their second) album Tyrannosaurus Hives, they arguably have a point to prove - one new song, "No Pun Intended", is pointedly directed at people who thought they were "some kind of joke".

The last laugh is theirs, if outward signs are anything to go by. They can now afford to have their name spelt out in cursive pink neon tubes, rather than cheap 100-watt lightbulbs, and they've had a bit of a makeover, with white tuxes and pilgrim ties on top of their famous black shirts.

With his grown-out hair, Pelle now looks like Jagger circa Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy For The Devil. His brother Nicholaus Arson still looks half Dick Van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, half Tony Curtis in Sex and the Single Girl, and the others are still John Goodman emerging from the shit and slime in Raising Arizona.

And the new material, upon first hearing, is fantastic (if derivative). Absurdly catchy comeback single "Walk Idiot Walk" is The Who's "Can't Explain" meets The Stones's "Brown Sugar", another sounds exactly like "Jeepster" by TRex, another like The Monkees' "Stepping Stone".

The famous 20-second freeze in the middle of "Die! Alright" has been ditched, but The Hives are still the epitome of exciting, rip-roaring rock'n'roll entertainment. "Like Gary Glitter once said," says Pelle, once he's sure we're eating out of his bony hand, "it's good to be back".

s.price@independent.co.uk

Jamelia: Hexagon, Reading (0118 960 6060), Mon; Shepherds Bush Empire, London W12 (0870 771 2000), Tue