The Cathouse, Glasgow, 03/11/13

The Toy Dolls' fan-base has not changed much over the years. They've settled down a bit now, got jobs and had kids, and a few have even grown respectable, with cardigans and coifs and grey hair combed flat. But to all intents and purposes the queue outside the Cathouse on Sunday night may as well have been frozen there for decades. The shaved heads, these days, are strategies of necessity rather than design, but the chains, the jackets, the buttons, the sewn-on labels - these are all straight from the Seventies, when the same crowd was queuing in the same place to see the same band. Almost.

It's the Toy Dolls themselves, paradoxically, who have changed. After thirty-five years and more than twenty-five members, all that's left of the kings of comic punk is their iconic frontman, Michael "Olga" Algar, and the songs, tongue-in-cheek punk with names like "Fisticuffs in Frederick Street" and "Nowt Can Compare to Sunderland Fine Fare". But it's their riotous covers for which the Toy Dolls are most widely known, cultural touchstones from "Blue Suede Shoes" to "Nellie the Elephant" transformed into breathlessly brilliant punk pathetique. A roomful of leatherclad skinheads pogoing to "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" - where else but with the Toy Dolls?

It may simply boil down to the fact that the Toy Dolls are by far the most lovable band in the UK. With their trademark sunglasses and tear-off, two-tone suits, their cultural references to corner shops and Coronation Street, their ceaseless, scurrying choreography - everything about the Dolls bespeaks a willingness to risk looking daft, and that's no small thing. God-like beings with perfect hair, strumming their angelic chords on distant stages - that's what I'm used to. But the Toy Dolls, they're down here in the trenches like the rest of us, participating in the everyday business of living; eating fish fingers, watching the telly, and balancing on the constant edge of naffness.

And enjoying it too, perhaps more than anyone has a right to enjoy anything. As their crouching runs carried them back and forth across the stage, Olga and Tom Blyth illuminated the Cathouse with childlike beams of pure and perfect joy - and not even in its darkest corners, still dangling with the cobwebs and cleavers of Halloween gone past, could the venue muster up a single scowling face. That sort of stage presence could carry most bands a long way, but with the Toy Dolls it just comes as standard.

Then there's the music, and the strident, schoolboy voice of Olga, which has not aged one bit. Though some of the cultural references grow dated, the songs themselves never have, and old staples like "I've Got Asthma" and "Olga I Cannot" are as funny and fresh as when first recorded. In their direct relevance to the lives of their listeners, these gossipy tales of work and affairs and quotidian heartbreak could not be further from the bombastic psychodrama of modern pop. Byron once said that everyone takes tea and toast, but no-one sings about it. Well, the Toy Dolls do.

At the end, after two encores, we filed down the stairs again, a crowd of leather jackets headed back to their dusty closets. Nearby, as we descended, someone growled that it was the first time they'd been in the front row for twenty-five years. I knew what he meant. For an hour and a half on Sunday night, the Toy Dolls gave people something they hadn't had for a long time. That's what they do. And for an all-too-brief moment, before the lights went off and the taxis came, there had been no second row in the Cathouse, just one long front row, and everyone had been in it.