Three years into their reunion, the legendary punk stalwarts have long swapped the chaos of their heyday for muscular verve and sheer razzmatazz with their stand-in frontman.

“What a beautiful venue this is, and what a beautiful stage!” Frank Carter exclaims with megawatt delight, tattooed hands braced against his hips as he surveys the sunkissed courtyard of The Piece Hall.

Clambering security barriers, the onetime Gallows and Pure Love star throws his arms up and wide with the gimlet-eyed glare of a demented aerobics instructor. “But open up the dancefloor for me! I want the oldest average circle pit in Halifax right now!”

Few men not only live punk but epitomise its original snot-freedom spirit as the frontman of the Rattlesnakes does. Certainly, for Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock, the trio must have felt like they struck gold when they gave the Hemel Hempstead man the keys to the Sex Pistols.

placeholder image — Sex Pistols at The Piece Hall

Three years into their reunion, their marriage of accidental convenience shows little appetite to wrap itself up; this date on a busy summer run has drawn aging mohawks and new-generation devotees from both sides of the Pennines for a celebratory night further burnished by World Cup fever.

For a group whose vaunted reputation of chaotic live mystique has long gone hand-in-hand with their cited influence on a multitude of genres, there is an undoubted slickness to the muscularity of the band these days. Jones, bedecked in a vintage England strip, peels out the beefy riffs of Holidays in the Sun with a spiky precision to the swagger; Seventeen, with its lush power-pop roots, feels just as well-honed.

When Pretty Vacant lands, it does so with the Swiss-clock styles of a metronomic jackhammer, interlocked shrewdly around Cook and Matlock’s rhythm section.

The end result perhaps then lacks a half-century of romanticized danger for some - but on pure musical merits, it proves to be a scintillating seventy minutes, handed further razzmatazz by the sheer verve of Carter’s delivery.

God Save the Queen finds him at his most Lydon-esque, full of sneering piss and vinegar, but the rest of the time, he takes his own route through these storied songs, more mellifluous in the way he coaxes Problems and My Way to the fore. “This sounds like rock and roll to me, so enjoy it while it lasts!” Jones cries before the hectic finale of Anarchy in the U.K. segues into a tongue-in-cheek snippet of Three Lions. This may not be your grandfather’s Sex Pistols - but it may well be better all the same.