Bloc Party: just a band” declares Scroobius Pip on ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’. You could be forgiven in thinking this is today’s general consensus. Despite headlining Glastonbury’s Other Stage and soundtracking each indie disco across the country, the Party could be drawing to a close with their current ‘Bloctober’ tour.

Last year’s Intimacy, the band’s most disappointing release to date, foundered and the 90s piano-driven house of recent single ‘One More Chance’ marked another alarming stage in their creative demise. Rumours of a split in the band have been rife. Drummer Matt Tong was recently quoted as saying that he “wouldn’t mind trying something else for a while” during the band’s imminent hiatus, casting doubt over the long term future of 2004’s “Next Big Thing”.

There were no such warning signs at Bloc Party’s sell out Cambridge gig on Tuesday, though. Transforming the cavernous Corn Exchange into an intensely sweaty indie club, the lads pulled off a blinder. An early journey by Kele Okereke into the front row during the wonderfully brash and dissonant ‘Mercury’ could have been fatal: one crazed fan exercised so tight a grasp on his t-shirt that security had to intervene.

The London quartet provoked a berserk response usually alien to conservative Cambridge gig-goers. As if having finally emerged from preservation in a cryogenic freezing chamber at the height of 2005’s Silent Alarm fervour, the kids demonically moshed, crowd surfed and even flung their clothes at Okereke. “This tour,” he informs “has been brilliant for clothes. Someone threw a leather jacket last night.” Often shy and retiring in interviews, on stage he is an assured frontman and an emotive performer, casting a striking shadow against the pulsating lights. Yet Tong is perhaps the true star of the band. Manically drumming in the nude save for a pair of skimpy white shorts, his tight loops dominated the angular aggression of ‘Banquet’.

The offending new single did improve in a live setting, before the drum machine packed in midway and the lads were forced to resort to an engagingly dancey encore of ‘Flux’ and ‘Helicopter’. But just as the houselights came up, they ventured on again, embarrassingly begging “One More Chance” to complete unfinished business. Any doubters should grant them such mercy, as a live Bloc Party is an absolute riot.