Magical jazz, a psychedelic circus, a musical version of Monty Python. These are some of the descriptions overheard at the interval as fans queued for the bar at the Bonzos' Cardiff gig.

A gratifying proportion of the audience looked sufficiently young and carefree not to have been around at the time of the band's final album in 1972.

But for those, like your reviewer, who heard the newly-released Canyons of Your Mind as an impressionable teenager in 1968, there was a big question. Would these old boys still have the magic?

The answer is yes ... with a little help from their friends.

This is a band formed, like so many, by art-school students. The big difference is that instead of wanting to ditch art for the option of rock-fame and megabucks, they stayed with their favourite art form - surrealism - and had a go at expressing it in music.

This meant, for example, that a humble trouser press became a musical instrument as well as the title of a song. A taste of the lyric: "Give it all you can; it's much better than the pre-fabricated concrete coal bunker."

Then there's the verbal surreality of Canyons of Your Mind. More than a match for Procul Harum's Whiter Shade of Pale, with the added benefit of being very funny.

So these guys had a lot to live up to. They kicked off with the upbeat Cool Britannia (yes, they minted that phrase) and moved on to a tragi-comic rendition of the Marlene Dietrich number, Falling in Love Again, played on an amplified musical saw.

There were robots - one blew bubbles, the other did a striptease - as the real-live men, now aged sixty or so, pranced and clowned about with wacky costumes and corny circus comedy acts while playing real brass and stringed instruments along with such novelties as a howling leg and a sort of kazoo/hosepipe/funnel thing.

The audience sang along as their favourite songs came up. And just when you had a twinge of suspicion that this might sink into the pathos of old men trying to relive their golden youth, along comes big-time Bonzo fan Ade Edmondson.

Without in any way aping the late, great Viv Stanshall, the former Young Ones star demonstrated that he knew what this music was all about. Playfulness, passion and a love of absurdity were there in abundance in every song he sang.

As he polished-off the sublime Rhinocratic Oaths, there was a lump in his throat as he declared: "I've known those words for 35 years."

The other guest star, Buzzcocks comic Phill Jupitus, also knew how to perform but didn't seem to get the point.

He forgot the silly relish in Big Shot and ruined Canyons of Your Mind by mumbling and stumbling over the all-important words while hugely overplaying the Elvis send-up aspect.

Worse than gilding the lily; this was slapping a coat of emulsion over the Mona Lisa.

Apart from that though, a massively enjoyable night to remember.

Nicholas Whitehead - Cardiff - November 2006