In Ken Hollings’ weird alternate reality, Operation Desert Storm is ongoing and the end just got further out of sight, because the President of the United States has been assassinated, perhaps by Elvis (who has been digitally resurrected but then infected by an AI virus), the Vice-President is under the control of aliens.

But the really bad news is that all those 1950s Japanese monster movies were allegorical – they were based on real monsters genetically engineered by the military – Gravaton, Micronosaur, Manta etc – who have just escaped from Earthquake Island and are on the rampage.

Only a teenage serial killer robot and a virtual reality boy and his dog, recently escaped from a Waco-esque religious cult, can save the day. And what’s really scary about this very violent fusion of Japanese pop culture, cyberpunk fiction and political satire is that, if you stick with it, it actually begins to make sense.

A mighty slab of trippy, cult, out-there fiction from Godzilla-obsessed Ken Hollings, with gorgeous hallucinogenic cartoons by Savage Pencil. Off-kilter is certainly is, with monsters ravaging Japan, soldier androids, Elvis hell-bent on killing politicians and a narrative pockmarked by splatter-horror movie guts and gore and split-second scenes. But despite its hip retro and conspiracy-theorist tone, there are spookily serious parallels about the plot’s Desert Storm scenario gone Vietnam with events spiralling out of control. Mind-bending reading

Ken Hollings’ Destroy All Monsters is a hallucinogenic spiral into future nightmare. The bastard son of Harlan Ellison, Orwell and Otomo’s Akira, it explodes with paranoia, desperation and the search for what little might be left of the human psyche after the soul has been sucked dry by technology, surveillance and hyper-violence.

As visual as a graphic novel, the visions detonate the base of the brainpan, forcing the reader to fear not only the present, but the doom inducing possibilities that the immediate future will no doubt bring, as the evil of stealth technology becomes part and parcel of our day to day existence. Frightful, gruesome, much to real.

Sometime in the almost now, Operation Desert Storm has been raging for almost two years, a resurrected Elvis is making a political comeback (of sorts) and gigantic Terror Monsters are destroying Japan. Might it be necessary to destroy the Earth in order to save it? Are parasitic aliens our only hope for world peace? And what about Puppy, the telepathic lab dog?

Ultraviolent, psychedelic mechamania, this is fictional history of the future as it really is. America is once again preparing us for war with Saddam Hussein. If George W. Bush knows what’s good for him, he’ll save a very comfy chair in the War Room for Ken Hollings. He may be our only hope.

Destroy All Monsters is the crazed bastard son of a Hong Kong action movie in unholy alliance with a Godzilla flick with a trace of semen from Philip K. Dick spooned in for good measure.

Where to start? Why, in a futuristic recent past, of course. We’re back in the Gulf War but not only have the smart bombs failed to arrive on Saddam’s doormat, guaranteed next-day delivery as promised, but the Iraqi soldiers have dug themselves into the desert, foxholed beneath the oil-blackened sky, and are refusing to budge.

Mr President meanwhile is eating family meals at Burger King in order to procure a cardboard golden crown for the Vice-President as a peace offering (shunned); Elvis is resurrected and is now a political assassin; monsters are attacking the world’s major cities (as is their wont); then there are the killer chicks, drug dealers and a telepathic, loaded vivisection lab mutt called Puppy.

Did I miss anything? Well, it’s illustrated by the legendary Savage Pencil (Sonic Youth, Big Black etc) and debutant novelist Ken Hollings also contributes regularly to Bizarre magazine, that last bastion of the ideological pervert. Get the picture? Dig in, you’ve nothing to lose but your mind.

This 50-minute feature from Ken Hollings might be better considered as a poem: something out of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal via the French Surrealist cinema and Throbbing Gristle’s brutalist chic.

Shot in expressionist monochrome, it roams the rooms and corridors of what might be the titular hospital, a grim Victorian edifice where bodies lie, untended on trolleys, nurses murder inmates, a nurse-patient love affair flutters in the shadows, the sick and blind stumble in Beckettian repetition and the oblique, disturbing narrative only hints at larger horrors.

Given all that, it hovers dangerously close to pretension, sometimes teeters over the edge, but still remains a darkly individual essay despite its precedents. It’s also blessed with the most exciting score – a brew of metal gamelan and junkyard bebop from Biting Tongues – that I’ve heard in ages

It has been 20 years since the original line-up of the Manchester based post-punk/avant funksters Biting Tongues last played together. In the mid-80s they went their various ways - drummer Eddie Sherwood left to join Simply Red, while Graham Massey co-formed 808 State - after the dialectical impetus of their punk-funk thang petered out. That seemed to be that. In 2003, however, in advance of an upcoming CD reissue of their 80s albums, the original Tongues have reunited to revisit their old terrain, only to find it surprisingly pristine and still fully funktional.

The Tongues formed in the late 70s, with a view to providing a soundtrack to their self titled 16mm film. Like many of their contemporaries, including The Pop Group, Cabaret Voltaire and Clock OVA, their music was a maniacal mélange which drew on John Cage, JG Ballard, Captain Beefheart, WS Burroughs, etc, co-opting and inverting the exuberance of funk to provide an agitated, cut-up and noirish yet vivid critique of a society apparently on the verge of 1984 for real.

The Tongues' politics were sublimated, their gigs more like 'happenings', with a built-in allowance for the spontaneous, whether it was hammering on oil cans or tearing up psychology handbooks onstage. The songs were nightmarish, pain-filled scenarios ("Reflector", "Heart Disease"), sweating in the sauna anguish of the 'Feverhouse'. This early period, 1980-83, is the one from which they draw for tonight's set.

Despite their long lay-off, The Tongues' playing hangs together extraordinary well. Even the tricky song suite "Evening State" is disposed of with an effortless ferocity. They're 'eclectic', of course, a much debased word in the commonplace Ambient soup of today, in which the disparate likes of Miles Davis, Can, Neu!, etc are too often reduced to a pleasantly liquefied, digital electronic puree. Biting Tongues' influences and elements, by contrast, from raw analogue keyboards to Howard Walmsley's angry, desolate sax - always a key component of funk noir - and Graham Massey's eviscerating rhythm guitar and violin, come at you in undissolved, uncompromised lumps.

Fears that The Tongues might revive cliches about early 80s Manc music - glum, enervated, listless - are turned inside out. There's a scathing ferocity about their set that takes aback some of the younger spectators especially as they ascend to the climax of their set, with "Everywhere But Here" and "Aaircare" gathering momentum.

"One day, you'll be able to tell your grandparents about this," quips vocalist and Wire contributor Ken Hollings. What's more, they play with a manifest glee. Walmsley, cheery in his Hawaiian shirt, grins throughout as affably as English cricketer Phil Tuffnell, Massey's guitar practically flies out of his hands as he tears from it great chunks of distressed funk, Hollings lurches upfront, looking like a cross between Greg Proops and David Byrne.

The atmosphere is part jolly boys' reunion, part elation at having collectively reignited their old fire. The dialectical wheel has come full circle and The Tongues, in the present day context, in which we've unlearned how to take them for granted, are as exhilarating and urgent as ever..

The recent live reunion of 80s avant-funksters Biting Tongues' 'classic' line-up was an unnerving reminder of the intense wattage they generated onstage. This collection is only as intermittently electrifying as their live work but it's still an essential document, not to mention reproach to those pop historians who caricature 1980s music as all poodle-haired hedonism and daft Goth, airbrushing out the sort of harrowing and exhilarating undercurrent of which Biting Tongues, among others, were a part.

Formed in 1979 to provide a soundtrack for the film from which they took their name, Biting Tongues made their album debut two years later with Don't Heal. Although, as the frank sleevenotes confirm, it turned out slightly damp and flat in places, thanks to the 70s studio predilection for muffled, over-panelled 'dead rooms', Biting Tongues at least got to set out their stall.

Obsessed with processed, scrambled and cut-up texts, vocalist (and current Wire contributor) Ken Hollings would deliver as terse, unsung prose, grim collages of imagery, which impinged on and tore through the fabric of the music the way sudden and disturbing events tear through the quilt of everyday life. Don't Heal was recorded in quick time to the random accompaniment of tapes of found sounds, superimposing another layer of chance.

Meanwhile, the group were picking other things out of the air. The way Howard Walmsley's tenor sax invoked the honking, preaching, atonal spirit of 60s free jazz loosely aligned them with contemporaries like James Chance, Blurt's Ted Milton, Cabaret Voltaire and Clock OVA, as did their inverted use of funk. Biting Tongues retained its structures and rhythms but replaced fatback hedonism with a more gristly foreboding in keeping with the tense, uncertain times.

What distinguished Biting Tongues, however, were future 808 Statesman Graham Massey's multi-instrumental virtuosity on guitar, clarinet, violin and keyboards, plus the group's determination to fly by the seat of their collective pants. With 1981's Live It, they had also learned to embellish their sound by whatever means necessary - the queasy, rising and falling metallic effect of "Denture Beach" is sourced from a wash tank, while "Dirt For 485" achieves its contemporary-sounding BlipHop effect by the simple expedient of clapping.

The group reached a zenith with 1982's Northern Lights and Libraville, from which the wailing "lyabhoone" and the immortal °Aair Care" are taken. Not unlike Pere Ubu, "44" posits a stark existential condition no one would even think to contemplate now: "I sleep alone now/I sleep on boards/I see the highway/But I don't travel."

After Hollings left in 1984 and a number of personnel changes, Biting Tongues' progress faltered. By the mid-80s they were highly proficient but lacking a context. With "Double Gold St Paul", they were effectively functioning as a chrysalis for Massey's 808 State