The NME know how to cater to their audience. Beneath the projector screens advertising the new Skins series, the Corn Exchange was filled with a crowd of expectant Topman-clad teens elated at the prospect of seeing their favourite Topman-clad indie rockers.

Things admittedly started badly. The Drums seemed on a mission to incorporate everything bad about indie into one Hoxton-cropped, skinny-jeaned half-hour set. Emerging into a single spotlight, frontman Jonathan Pierce’s peacock posing would have made Vince Noir blush, a situation only made worse by his terrible groovy-dad dance moves... Taken out of the studio and set on stage the bare-bones arrangements exposed Pierce’s regrettable lyrics, with lines like "I see a beautiful flower, it’s trampled on the ground, it reminds me of who you used to be" verging dangerously close to hormonally-charged teenage poetry. Despite some fleeting moments of prettiness, The Drums’ Cure-lite sound failed to excite all but the youngest audience members.

Looking just about as wasterish as a band arriving onstage to Cypress Hill’s ‘I Want To Get High’ can, The Big Pink’s waves of static and rock star posturing were an immediate improvement . The band’s ear-serration tactics turned the set into a continuous wall of noise from beginning to end, the gaps between songs stitched together by decibel-wrenching feedback. Undoubtedly the set highlight was the majestic ‘Velvet’, though ‘Too Young To Love’ was transformed into a feedback-drenched deafener, with Robbie Furze’s vocal barely cutting through Milo Cordell’s piercing sample snatches. A euphoric version of single ‘Dominos’ closed a set that may well have been the highlight of the night.

The ten sprightly young men that constitute Bombay Bicycle Club and The Maccabees do what they do well, but they haven’t much more to offer on stage than they do on record in terms of excitement. What energy there was came courtesy of their enthusiastic, almost entirely teenage audience, who knew all the lyrics to everything. The Bicycles were received with a cacophony of screams; the Maccabees even more rapturously. The effect was uplifting, even if you are one of those who don’t know all the lyrics. Melodic art-pop hooks in songs such as Bicycle Club’s ‘Always Like This’ spin out their ‘distinctive’ sheet of sound over the quiet bass.

When they cycle off on a tangent, BBC took some surprising revolutions, like a brief middle eight in ‘Emergency Contraception Blues’, but such moments were fleeting. The Maccabees were more focused on enlivening their live sound, having brought along a brass section, the Blackjack Horns, enriching the gravitas of songs such as ‘Wall of Arms’. Another unexpected addition to the usual Maccabees’ fare was their bouncy cover of Orange Juice’s ‘Rip It Up’. While the music was spasmodically good, drama was lacking. The Bicycles’ Jack Steadman hop-danced in front of the mike in a manner only superseded by The Bees’ Orlando Weeks’ awkward shuffle-step. Another (incidental) note of sameness: both these frontmen were sporting unforgiving pudding-basin barnets and white t-shirts. Yet by the middle of The Maccabees’ set crowdsurfing was rife. This energy did seem a little out of kilter with the sounds being produced; ‘Toothpaste Kisses’ lends itself more to waltzing than moshing.

Amongst this unvaried white-boy indie rock amassed by NME, there is much that is good, but nothing truly great. Their moments, when they come, are the more rewarding for having been absent before but they are followed by lengthy longueurs. These bands are not new and their audiences know and love them, which is not to be disparaged. But this is not what we have come to expect from the NME tour, which has managed, previously, to air exciting new acts alongside little-known but diverse support bands.