And it’s just like 1991. Unlike the multitude of other bands on their reunion tours – armed with a post modern irony, a wildly changing lineup, a fond look back – Nitzer Ebb are determindedly as stubborn as they ever were. Everything is exactly the way it was way back when. No retrospective resetting, no knowing irony, no soppy speeches. To the audience, this could be a war, or perhaps a bizarre S&M routine.

With 15 songs in 75 minutes, the set is a short terse machine-gun history lesson. The gaps between songs can be counted in milliseconds. Between song prounouncements last no longer than two words – and those words are almost always “THANK YOU!”. Each song is an abrupt, curt statement of military intent.

In fact, in overall tone and feel, it’s akin to watching a robotic version of The Ramones. Each song is a fierce roar. Melodies aren’t so much present as sliced into fragments and scattered. A chorus is generally between three letters and three words long. One of them just sees the crowd punching the air screaming “YOU!” twelve times in a row. Less is more. Perhaps some kind of weird zen lyrical minimalism welded to a primal roar of sound. Sometimes you expect the singer to look through his fringe, yell "ONE-TEW-FREE-FOR!!!!" and sing “The KKK Took My Baby Away”…

Whilst the crowd – fifteen years older, balder, fatter – pause for breath four songs in, the unrelenting barrage of noise, colours and ice continues relentless. It’s what being beaten up by a gang would sound like, if you could capture that on vinyl.  And the Ebb are received almost heroically by the selective audience.

Musically, songs live on a purely rhythmical basis : two drum parts, two bass lines, odd stabs of punctuation. Things like melody lines and electronic orchestration appear only on a handful of songs, most of which aren’t played tonight. Instead The Ebb – huge in Germany and former Communist countries, not so anywhere else – provide a brutally minimal soundtrack for some kind of therapeutic dancing.

They pound on ancient kits that look like artifacts. Doug, their vocalist stalks the stage in knee high leather jodphurs, covered in belts, and generally giving off the air of someone who could kill but can’t be bothered. To the right, the bands Chris Lowe, Bon Harris, pounds on things and yells occasionally. To the left, some blonde German techno goddess pouts her way through a drum setup that looks like a spaceship and yells a lot even though there isn’t a voice mike anywhere near her. It’s a Blue Peter Time Capsule from August 1991.

Sounds awful doesn’t it? Their body of work tonight consists of 90% non-hit singles. 90% songs that never made the top 60. And they are raptuously received. The roar that greets the collosal “Godhead” – a song with more guitar parts than a multitracked Queen epic from 1974 – sounds almost like Robbie singing “Angels”. Towards the end of the main set (55 minutes, just like the old days), former drummer Doug Gooday joins and Nitzer Ebb become that most improbable of things : some hyper stylised, military techno version of “Stomp!” with three times as many drummers as singers, and no other instruments on stage. Doug stomps around the stage like some furious middle manager confronting an underperforming sales team, screaming “GOLD! CHURCH! LIES! MUSCLE! HATE!”

And it is fantastic in a homoerotic, remaining men together, "Fight-Club-The-Musical" kind of way. The one thing I forgot is how invincible a Nitzer Ebb show made me feel. As if I could take on the whole world – and give the world five minutes free punching. I’d be standing at the end, muttering “Come on You Wimps!” before doing something even more foolhardy.

After arriving on stage at 9.45, the Islington Academy is shunted out before eleven in a state of sweaty exhaustion. A set of economical size , the absence of anything off their final album, and the pruning of “Ascend” and “Family Man” from the running order overall leave a slightly sour taste in the mouth of the faithful few. After all, this is the first proper British show The Ebb have given in over eleven years. In the meantime though, it feels almost ungrateful to complain of a set that has been timed to perfection to meet the requirements of twenty or so obscure festivals on the European mainland, finishing in sweaty tents at 1.30am, and thus, The Ebb’s mission : a short, undiluted precis of everything that they ever were in superconcentrated form has been achieved.

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