When you are younger the world looks huge. As you get older, the emotions of your youth seem bigger and more vivid than anything you experience in the present.

These two ideas play against each other in this hybrid show – part gig, part theatre – conceived by Jane Horrocks and choreographer Aletta Collins, which explores the post-punk and new wave music of Horrocks’ Lancashire youth in the days before she hit the big time in Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice and as Bubble in Absolutely Fabulous.

A quartet of dancers haunt the stage, their limbs twitching and convulsing like Horrocks’ adolescent heart, while the sleek, middle-aged Horrocks belts out songs such as Joy Division’s Atrocity Exhibition and the Smiths’ I Know it’s Over – all produced, by Kipper, to expunge the grime. When Horrocks sits on the outsize plug which dominates Bunny Christie’s design to deliver the Human League’s Empire State Human, she looks as tiny as one of Mary Norton’s Borrowers trying to make sense of the human world and its emotions.

“This is archaeology,” explains Horrocks at one point. It is, but it is archeology without nostalgia. There is no Desert Island Discs-style explaining of the significance of the songs Horrocks has chosen to cover. Instead, If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me – which takes its title from an unperformed Marc Almond song – occupies the shadowy territory between a fully fledged theatre show and a gig; territory that others, including Anonymous Society, have already tried to map.

Sometimes it’s successful. The Fall’s My New House turns the banal and domestic into a horror movie, a kitchen full of pale ghosts through which an arctic wind has recently blown. A girl sits on a chair, her face illuminated by a blade of light from an open fridge. Collins’ choreography has a gargoylish ugly-beauty, as if in love with its own deformities, reflecting a world of broken, twisted hearts and dreams. The opening number, Gang of Four’s Anthrax, sets the choreographic tone as if the line “Like a beetle on its back” has been applied to all of the movement, with its jerking, flailing limbs, like zombies with jazz hands. You long for more variety, for something less emotionally remote.

Break down its individual parts and this is a technically impressive, slick hour, but it springs few surprises, except for the unlikely sight of Rat Scabies from the Damned drumming on the Young Vic stage. It’s fatally over-produced. Paul Morley tells us in the programme that this music emerged from a mid-70s Manchester “still covered in war dust”. But the dust has been Mr Sheened away here. New wave has never seemed quite so spick and span.

• At Young Vic, London, until 16 April. Box office: 020-7922 2922.