Manic Street Preachers @ Brixton Academy, London

It’s 21 years since the Manic Street Preachers released debut single ‘Motown Junk’, with its key lyric “21 years of living and nothing means anything to me”.

Last night, Nicky Wire celebrated his 42nd birthday, and a lot’s changed over the years. For a start, the Manics have transformed from small-town valley boys in spray-painted blouses, spouting half-baked polemic about Welsh welfare state hero Aneurin Bevan, into millionaire stadium rockers whose tunes soundtrack Match of the Day.

Rescheduled from December after James Dean Bradfield was cruelly struck down with laryngitis, tonight’s show has the feel of a pre-Christmas knees-up, with a setlist made up mainly of hits.

The opening ‘Slash and Burn’ takes on new meaning in the context of the dementedly scissor-happy Tory government, while the climactic ‘Design for Life’ and its opening line “Libraries gave us power” seems even more poignant now that many of the buildings are about to be turned into kebab shops.

But tonight is about partying, not politics. The Manics play a joyous selection of material from over the last two decades, including well-worn anthems like ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ and ‘You Love Us’, as well as a couple of pleasant surprises (‘Tsunami’, from This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, has aged better than we have).

The nostalgia-tinged atmosphere is heightened by the surprising number of times Richey Edwards is mentioned, and his presence is felt during James’s solo acoustic rendition of ‘This is Yesterday’ from their 1994 masterwork The Holy Bible.

The only low point is ‘My Little Empire’, a dirgy paean to boredom from Nicky's “I love hoovering” phase. 21 years on, they will always mean something to us.