'I'm a Nazi homosexual injecting morphine in a Belgian brothel." Welcome pop pickers, you join us as we chortle our way through a fantastically funny and inventive musical parody show at the Edinburgh festival. That opening line should be more than enough for you to know what is being parodied, writes Brian Boyd.

What possible genre of music would throw up that line as a lyric and dare to get away with it in a po-faced intellectual manner? Yes, we're at Gary Le Strange's superb deconstruction of the New Romantic oeuvre. All the gang are here - Le Strange's Seedy Pimp in Soho song neatly skewers Soft Cell (sample lyric: "Do you like German nurses with fat hairy necks?") and David Sylvian would find the blood draining from his cheekbones if he heard how Le Strange introduces a Japan-esque track with the line: "This one's kind of like the hokey cokey but set in war-torn Europe".

There's some really smart stuff here - David Bowie tries to get away with "Daddy loves his chimney face, I heard it on the news", while the generic Warriors Of Style informs us that "We are warriors and fashion is our weapon". Elsewhere there are songs about what it's like to be a car (yes, that's you, Gary Numan) and owning a robot, and somewhere in there lies a love song with the lines: "Like Jockey Wilson and Darth Vader combined she threw a treble 20 into my mind".

You always sort of knew there was something a little unhealthy about the New Romantics - that strange obsession with things Teutonic, etc - but it takes Le Strange to really expose how utterly preposterous the entire genre was - how technology and foreign place names were the bedrock of the whole movement and how terminally humourless all its practitioners were.

And what style were those synth-popsters singing in? As Le Strange has it, each and every vocalist of the era had only one vocal gear: begin to sing in a vaguely minatory baritone and, as the song progresses, throw in a few tortured, existential yelps to get across the futuristic Germanic bleakness of it all. This he does to perfection when he sings "Onward, upward, sideways, down to the record company/We rip the gold discs from the walls and melt them down for jewellery/Fascistic guards in horrendous clothes eject us through the door/Wise men say we should leave it there, but we've got to fight this bloody war."

Played by comic actor Waen Shepherd, Gary Le Strange has done us all a service by extinguishing any doubts that anything from the New Romantic era had any worth whatsoever. The problem from the beginning was that it had more to do with fashion than music and was too much of a severe over-reaction to the earthiness of punk. More a pretentious nightclub-based scene than anything else, the New Romantics believed themselves to be throwing a contemporary spin on the glory days of glam rock, whereas they were really a deluded bunch of poseurs who listened to one Kraftwerk song and then hit the Boots make-up counter.

Bowie was the obvious overriding influence, but where the frilly white shirts came from remains a mystery. The crucial mistake was replacing the stomping guitar rock music of Glam with largely synth-based electropop.

While Slade (the band Oasis could have been) knew about musical dynamics, the New Romantics thought that plonking away enigmatically on a crappy Casio keyboard while plastered in foundation and kohl meant they were a cultural movement. Which is why Ticketmaster are never bothered that much by people wondering when the A Flock Of Seagulls reunion tour is going to happen and why people like to pretend that the whole thing never really happened.