When Coldcut's Matt Black and Jonathan More were in their pioneering heyday, live performances of dance music were often criticised for being simply "boffins pressing buttons". That could hardly be said of the pair today. At Manchester University, the walls above the stage are covered with huge video screens, which show images illustrating the songs' themes - from the greenhouse effect to globalisation. Below, Black and More sit alongside two additional knob-twiddlers, leading New York MC Mike Ladd to dub them "the quadruplets of beats". A long table hosts a feast of gizmos, wires, boxes and computers. It's like the Last Supper, with laptops.

This very human show mostly avoids the aimless, experimental grooves of recent years in favour of comeback album Sound Mirrors, which shifts back towards the dance-era songs that made the Coldcut name. Former Fingers Inc man Robert Owens illuminates the troubled Walk a Mile in My Shoes; when he is revealed as barefoot, someone seems to have taken him literally. Roots Manuva, who provides vocals for True Skool, sadly only appears on screen. But, in the role made famous by Lisa Stansfield, Mpho Skeef's vocals on the classic People Hold On transform a euphoric 1990s anthem into a wistful lament for positivity that somewhere gave way to global warming, Bush and Bin Laden.

Suddenly, the demented ecstasy-heads at the front appear very anachronistic: the subtext is that both dance music and humanity need to grow up. After the landmark Paid in Full from 1986 whisks us back to innocent times, we are jolted forward 20 years (and joined by Blues Explosion's Jon Spencer) for Everything Is Under Control. Easily the song of the night, it's a pulverising attack of dance, blues, CCTV and authoritarian power that suggests that these dance music veterans are looking squarely, if uncomfortably, at 2006.

· At Shepherd's Bush Empire, London WC2, tonight. Box office: 0870 771 2000. Then touring.