During this morning’s trawl through the bank holiday weekend email spam I spotted a plea for support from divisive stand-up comedian Stewart Lee.

“Dear all,” it read, “Overlooked National Treasures The Nightingales (and Subway Sect) are closing my SOUTH BANK CENTRE AUSTERITY BINGE on Monday 30th May. Here are two great reviews from the current tour. Please twat this if you are a tweeter.”

It was a plea for attendance and cultural support on a wet night when most of that London were journeying back from their renovated Cornish fishing village, or still apologising for inappropriate behaviour at the Sunday night barbecue. I’d turned up out of a sense of duty (I’d written a preview piece for the magazine) and curious nostalgia (the Nightingales were one of my teenage indie-kid obsessions) and, truth be told, signs weren’t good. With less than ten minutes to go, there were barely ten supporters visible amidst the school-hall fluorescence of The South Bank’s Purcell Room. One female punter muttered ominously, something about having “seen him recently, and he looked broken, ruined.”

But by the dimming of the lights the hall was healthily half full, and Subway Sect effortlessly dispelled any fears of ruined reunion, the acerbic, attenuated Vic Godard leading his 2011 model band through a nervy set of cheese-wire sharpness, spitting out peculiar pop songs, rich in political anger and English scorn.

Yet nothing in Subway Sect’s admittedly excellent return could have prepared for the astonishing revelation of Rob Lloyd’s Nightingales. Formed out of the ashes of blackly-comic Birmingham punk upsetters The Prefects, Nightingales Mk. 1 existed from 1979 to ’86, Black Country Magic Banders spinning Daedalian indie skronk around Lloyd’s slashing gnomic utterances. Since reforming in 2004, Nightingales Mk 2 have survived – like post-punk fellow-travellers The Fall – as an ever-shifting cast of players, a tightly schooled all-ages boot-camp in the employ of one man’s absurdist poetic invective.

Recently retrained at Jochen Irmler’s Faust Studio, tonight Lloyd and founder Prefects guitarist Alan Apperley field a side barely three weeks old. Bassist Andreas Schmid, a Faust Studio apprentice, is suitably young and severe, the possible leader of some Marxist-Leninist ’70s student cell, in academic black suit and socialist haircut. Skinny in black jeans and black western shirt, hair like squid-ink candy floss, rhythm guitarist Matt Wood resembles a teenage Horrors offcast, while from behind her own heavy witch-black fringe ex-Violet Violet drummer Fliss Kitson pounds out the glam-kosmische bin rhythms. As Lloyd takes the stage – stout, bespectacled, wily smile flickering between joy and contempt – the image is complete; it is the embittered Marxist history teacher fronting the school band, the academy in peril.

With no time for nostalgia, tonight The Nightingales ignore any notion of greatest hits in favour of joyous reinvention. Feeding off the hard-drilled energy of these junior initiates, Apperley spins frayed Bo Diddley riffs around Lloyd’s tumbling psychedelic eavesdroppings, allowing the singer to recycle, reinvent and repurpose thirty years of vituperative notebook aphorisms, constructing an intense, breathless narrative from the recycled past to the scorched present. And, like some Christ-like curmudgeon, newly risen to grouse again, Lloyd feeds off the audience fervour, growing stronger, yet ever wary; grinning broadly, flicking the Vs, and mouthing “What the f—?!”

With every repurposed song – plus a combative cover of Gary Glitter’s I Didn’t Know I Loved You (Till I Saw You Rock & Roll) – the band become yet more powerful, Apperley and the kids locked in a heavy zig-zag groove as Lloyd bellows out caustic images from his mordant world-view, like some Black Country Stuart Staples, holidaying in the window of an Arndale Pound Shop. The cumulative effect is one of euphoric delight, of old knowledge in the hands of new disciples. “Dig the depth of the furrow of mirth that I can plough,” sings Lloyd on The Overreactor. Tonight The Nightingales hit an epic new low. Catch them when they’re at it again.