THE Ramones may have gone to the CBGBs in the clouds but their spirit lives on in the shape of four young women who prove being a girl group doesn't mean you have to be The Saturdays.

And, apart from being women and not American, the Ramonas were about as close as you can come to the real thing without also being dead. Brilliant.

The Ramonas also proved it's actually possible to play even faster than 'Da Brudders' did. They kicked off with Rockaway Beach and sprinted through the first 15 songs in under 30 minutes. That's fast. In fact, they were so rapid they ended up proving Einstein's theory of relativity; the gig went on for an hour and a half but the audience only aged 35 minutes: amazing.

Not that there was much of an audience to benefit from all this time-warping. When the female Joey yelled 'One, two, three, four', during Today Your Love Tomorrow the World, I thought she was doing a head count. Maybe that's because nearly everyone in Union Street was too busy either acting macho or dressing up as schoolgirls – or in some cases both – to be bothered with going to see a band haring through Rock 'n' Roll High School like they were an Olympic sprinter pursued by a bloke with a white coat and a test tube.

Well, that's their loss, because they missed a brilliant spectacle and a set of pop songs so catchy even the Beatles, Abba and Norway's Eurovision winner couldn't top them. Teenage Lobotomy, Sheena Is A Punk Rocker, Commando and the best pop song ever penned, I Wanna Be Sedated – it's the greatest set list in history, and performed by a band that managed to be simultaneously cool, tough, streetwise, warm, funny and feminine: no mean feat.

The girl playing Joey had his trademark loveable ungainliness down to a fine art, but yet kept her friendly Scots burr when addressing the audience.

"I wanna be your boyfriend," she told the almost exclusively male crowd, introducing the other best pop song ever penned. Er, give me a few minutes to get my head around that statement. Too late; the song's over. Meanwhile, the distaff Dee Dee did a fine impression of the bassist's singing on that charming tale of street-corner loitering, 53rd and 3rd, while the guitarist had Johnny's legs-apart stance and downstroke strumming style off pat and didn't half churn out a maelstrom of guitar noise. Marvellous. And let's not forget the drummer, who may have been tiny but was power-packed, hitting the skins like she was trying to clobber some sense into a grown woman dressed in school uniform.

The audience, which had swelled a fair bit by the second half of the show, was captivated, edging ever closer to the stage as the group continued to blast through a slew of perennial favourites including Chinese Rocks, the brilliant Poison Heart, a tearjerking Wonderful World and set-closer Blitzkrieg Bop – yet another candidate for best pop song ever penned – and all at a pace that could have landed them a fixed penalty notice. "Hey ho, let's go," they sang, and then were gone. But like the real Ramones they left behind a little something on all our hearts.