ROCK / All you have to do is dre-ea-m

DESPITE the best efforts of the Brixton Academy doormen - turning out pockets, sniffing at empty sweet-wrappers, discovering the remains of a packet of Tunes and asking 'What are you, a dealer?' - the effects of mind-contracting chemicals are everywhere in evidence at The Orb's all-night ambient soup kitchen. If this many bodies were crammed into this amount of space on a train, there would be fighting. Instead people are sitting down, sleeping, smiling, embracing each other. It's a nightmare.

Or more properly a dream come true. If someone had told Orb-axis Alex Patterson when he was carrying the amplifiers for the early-Eighties rock savages Killing Joke that he would one day have a No 1 album about UFOs, play chess on Top of the Pops to the sound of his 40-minute single and make Steve Hillage, Hawkwind and Pink Floyd names to drop on the nation's dancefloors, he would probably have said 'Yes, I know.' Now he and his accomplices lurk onstage amid a mass of technology, behind a revolving ball with bits of debris stuck in it. Birdsong, sci-fi voices and snatches of Dastardly-and- Muttley dialogue emerge through the contemplative keyboard burblings. Sometimes, as on the current single, 'Assassin', there's a dense clanking pulse of percussion; or a big dub reggae bass line to rattle your teeth. But mostly, nothing much happens. They play forever. It's not unpleasant.

Earlier in the week at the Kilburn National, there is also a healthy full house. If Happy Mondays - the band that lit up the nation's rough underside in the flash of a strobe light - really are about to go belly up, it will not be for lack of public goodwill. A heterogenous crowd dances happily to British rap's nearly-men turned rising stars, Stereo MC's. But when the main attractions come on, the evening takes a downward turn. The Happy Mondays start with 'Wrote for Luck', the song that really established their eclectic, organic dance-rock hybrid in the musical seed-catalogue. Tonight it takes several minutes to recognise it - the sinewy delicacy of the Mondays sound seems to have been flattened out into one long, ponderous rock thump. This might be the instrumentalists' revenge on their wayward singer Sean Ryder, but there are cracks in their new professionalism.

Dancer Bez, who was always there onstage as a reminder of what might happen to your brain if you took too many drugs, now sports a horribly broken arm as a warning not to go water-skiing just after a car crash. Drenched in sweat, he wanders aimlessly about the stage, occasionally managing a feeble royal wave of the maracas. Rowetta, the support singer whose stentorian tones have become an ever more vital part of the Mondays' operation, is dressed in a schoolgirl outfit

Benny Hill Show producers would have rejected as too demeaning. For reasons known only to herself, she half-heartedly brandishes a whip and pantomimes a variety of sexual acts with a succession of cuddly toys.

Sean Ryder meanwhile, hook-nosed poet of post-industrial slackness, is getting the lyrics right, but his heart doesn't seem to be in it. 'People aren't just bundles of words,' he said recently. But that is exactly what they are, and it is Ryder's ability to truss up whole bundles of communal experience that has made him, at his best, such a great and original songwriter. Tonight though, he and his band seem to be heading in different directions. When 'Step On' trips up, Sean turns and asks 'What happened there?' in the manner of someone who's come home from work to find plumbers have messed up his kitchen.

The domestic scene looms large in Neneh Cherry's Homebrew (Circa), the follow-up to her massively successful debut Raw Like Sushi (1989). Recorded at home in Sweden, the album is awash with designer folksiness, from the pram on the front cover to the intro song in which Neneh comforts her crying child - 'Quiet, baby, let me just do this tune.' Cherry's determination to establish herself as a sassy everywoman has always jarred a bit, given her outrageously advantaged upbringing at the knees of the world's top jazz musicians. The muted popular response to the first single 'Money Love' suggests a second triumph is not on the cards. But there is some good music here: rough around the edges, but the better for that. The highlight is a bizarre duet with REM's Michael Stipe, an eloquent plea for better sex education in schools, delivered over the guitar line from Steppenwolf's classic, 'The Pusher'.

Happy Mondays play Cambridge Corn Exchange (0223 357851) tonight; The Orb play Norwich UEA (0603 505401) tonight, and tour all week (071-323 3888).