There can't be many excuses for a back-up band at a triple bill, but back it up they did at last night's The Good The Bad album launch at Madame Jojo's. Way up.
Hot Fiction deserve a mention for their efforts. A two-man White Stripes (drums and bass) with - both literally and metaphorically - an extra set of balls, they play an old-school, sludged-up tangent somewhere between The Stripes and The Killers, with a few Hendrix-lix and hints of the Bayou thrown in. It's like something you might have seen on black-and-white Top of the Pops, only with better amps, tailor-made for a Guy Ritchie "nemesis" scene (flesh-eating pigs as standard).
It was not the fault of Peter Parker's Rock'n'Roll Club (celebrating the release of a limited-edition 7-inch double A-side) that they followed with more of the same. This standard trio - vox/guitar, bass, drums - had an early Stones thing going, with Bobby Gillespie vocals: like a slower Hives without the shrieking, or Jet - if Jet had played at Fifties tea dances.
Peter Parker's drummer drummed like John Goodman using a child's cutlery
Unfortunately, though, Peter Parker were also boring. Their drummer drummed like John Goodman using a child's cutlery, and despite having Russell Brand (or was it Jesus?) on the guitar, they still couldn't rip things up. Several of their songs weren't so much verse-chorus-verse-chorus as chorus-chorus-chorus-chorus-CHORUS, and a lot of the chord sequences within those songs likewise. It's a big ask to smelt any irony out of garage rock, so it's probably better to commit. Instead of which Peter Parker just sounded a little embarrassed about their choice of song titles: "Woman, Gonna be Your Man" isn't something a white boy should be saying while staring bashfully at his toes.
The evening was starting to lose its lustre (it was perhaps a little unkind of DJ Sunta Templeton to stick on "Black Betty" afterwards, as if by way of a "this is how it's done" NB), but just when it looked like the rock'n'roll vibe was digging in for the duration, along came The Cut Outs.
A change of pace and calibre, The Cut Outs brand themselves "dirty dance-rock... a big mouthful of innuendo... a sensual frenzy that make[s] you think you've been caressed, punched, loved and blown... [apart at the same time]." Touting a forthcoming four-track EP, Honey Where Your Mouth Is, Lycra-assed provocateurs Stevie Watson and Jessica Coyne made lust to their microphones (alas) through the medium of toughened up, back-beaten Franz Ferdinand, tending towards Editors, on the dystopian scale of the Klaxons. With nice legs. (Nothing against Damian Horner-Pausma on drums. He was just sitting down, is all.) Their in-yer-face quality was quite the turn-on. And a little girl-on-girl harmony never killed anybody.
The Good The Bad claim to be raising the birth rate in Denmark
And then The Good The Bad. Just off tour with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, this high-energy trio are promoting the release of their second album, From 018 to 033, at the end of next month. It's a cinematic sound, riding the wave of what they call New School Surf and Flamenco. But chirpy beach-pop it ain't (the band claim to have been raising the birth rate in Denmark "since their own explosive conception").
If Quentin Tarantino had been the fifth Beatle (the Hidden Beatle?) this is how things would have gone. The Shadows with real big cojones. Spaghetti western, with extra red sauce. With their leader, Adam Olsson, cutting about in cavalry trousers, and the drummer topless (and male) from the get-go, they went at it hard, and in the bigger numbers I had flash visions of Queens of the Stone Age re-orchestrating the soundtrack for Apocalypse Now (the fact that The Good The Bad work out of a nuclear bunker in Copenhagen may not be coincidental). You couldn't much tell one track from the next, there being no lyrics (playlist: 001, 002, 003, 004, 010, 011, 019...), but it was damn good stuff, steamy and inviting and heavily involved.
And if, at the end of the night, I felt The Cut Outs had pipped them at the post, it was purely for the awesome crassness of their briefing notes. And the Lycra.
Add comment