Rather like a British version of The Velvet Underground, Gang Of Four were top of precisely no pops. Now, exactly 30 years after their only Top 50 British album, Entertainment!, Gang Of Four are almost as influential as The Velvet Underground and their angular, dance-tinged art-punk seeps through Franz Ferdinand, Radio 4, Bloc Party and even their great fans Coldplay.

Gang Of Two might be more apt these days since drummer Hugo Burnham and bassist David Allen fled in 2006 shortly after the volatile original line-up’s disappointingly half-hearted reunion. Today, singer Jon King and guitarist Andy Gill are joined by two hirelings, so fresh-faced you fear they won’t be allowed out at night when term starts.

But as they proved during last night’s warm-up show at a tiny Shoreditch pub, the frisky and gifted young bucks have shaken the old stagers out of their comfort zone. Much has changed for the former angry agitproppers since their hardly hay-making heyday.

Gill — more starey than scary at 53 — is now Bono’s well-connected chum and godfather to Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates’s daughter Heavenly Hiraani, and at one point he even offered advice to would-be house purchasers: “This isn’t the right time; there’s going to be a double dip.” Yet even Gill’s dapper, besuited urbanity could not emasculate his still-innovative guitarwork, especially on a thrilling attack upon their finest moment, To Hell With Poverty, and the new Hero.

Meanwhile, even if King’s cod-Marxism was always more Harpo than Karl, he flailed his arms, shook his maracas and acted as though it were the early Eighties, be it swinging from the light fittings (I feared for him and those under his flight path) during Ether, namechecking Joseph Conrad between songs and even instigating audience participation (“you can clap if you want; we’re in a pub”) during a drum-fuelled Damaged Goods.

And it was strangely comforting to sense some of the old fury in an ominous We Live As We Dream Alone, where the on-stage barging appeared not to be entirely the side-effect of a tiny stage.

Strangely, there was no airing of Gill’s trademark melodica and when they overdid their anaemic funk side, you remembered they influenced Hue And Cry too, but they’re justifying their legacy at last.