Picture the scene: a green rubiks cube shaped office building in Croydon. I decide to work late rather than race off early to meet other mailing list spods in World's End, possibly in anticipation of spending half of the next morning writing this review thing. Hurrah for my conciencious behaviour! (And not because of anxiety about my workmates' reaction to my boots o' purest purple. Oh no.) And hey!, I'd be *bound* to see them in the ballroom.......
Arrive in Camden just after 8, and head straight for the Atom-Powered Ballroom. (Not that there's much heading involved, you just stumble out of the station and there y'are). For some reason it seems to have grown since my last visit - the air of some sort of youth club - but with a bar as you enter is the same, but the arena itself seems to have grown bigger. Decide to have some lager to stop intense boot-related paranoia and to aid enjoyment of eclectic music selection. ("Take the Skinheads Bowling" by Camper Van Beethoven is a good thing to play. "I Just Wanna Be A Winner" by Brown Sauce (*) is not, even in an attempt at kitsch.)
Seafood were pretty interesting - they have some nice little songs in there, but they stretch them out with dull instrumental bits that don't work. They might be pretty good once they work out that sometimes less is, y'know, more.
After about half a minute of Earl Brutus I decide that they are, mostly, rubbish. Their songs are no good, and they seem to consist of two bloke shouting, one bloke joining in intermittently, one bloke miming a guitar, and one bloke who may (or may not) be miming some keyboards. However, to not enjoy watching them you'd have to be dead. It's difficult to pinpoint exactly why, but any band whose guitar bloke starts offering bits of the crowd out are clearly worth a look. The DJ then regales us with some girlpop classics, including Toni Basil's "Hey Micky". Bless.
Lauren, Marie, Emmy-Kate and Dot enter stage left for breathy-singing non-dancing version of Come Out 2Nite. Feel spine start to tingle helplessly and turn to jelly, and am only rescued by the arrival of X (carrying some species of bag, as if it were some sort of security blanket) and Graham the drummer at the end. And off we go into the dark and scary world that is the new stuff. (ANd from now on, all song titles are guesswork).
Run Me Over and I Would Fix You ("You must have bought the single. I don't think anybody else did" sniffs Lauren) pass by, and by the time Lunch At Lassiters (I, erm, think) kicks in, with it's curious oh-so-indie Delgados-ish guitar bits and it's fantatically spine-tinglingly lovely chorus , we're all in love with the all-new Kenickie. Marie's disco number is terrific, but Lauren and X's 60's bitch doesn't really get going until the very end, when Lauren suddenly turns from gentle indie type to hard nosed diva, the oh-so-fragile voice curiously going...erm ....less fragile (**).
And then the rest of the band return, and from them of things are a bit of a blur. Montrose Has The Horn (no alternative title necessary) swirls past, In Your Car and "our new fast one" pass by a whirr of frantic pogoing and twats with crap haircuts (***). The new kids seem to fit in like extra fingers on the gloves on the hands of a mutated student - Graham the drummer, with his ludicrous shirt and his singing along is clearly in the right place, while Dot seems like the cool cousin-type figure who strolls into an American Teen Sitcom and appears in the title sequence the next week. X still seems confused as to what he is though - part rock axe-hero, part punk warrior, part Fruitbat out of Carter USM (****) and part backing group of ex-Australian soap opera star.
Meanwhile, the girls seem oddly quiet - the usual banter replaced by curiosity as to if people get it, I think. Emmy-Kate didn't say anything at all, which was most unusual. By the final stomp-a-long with bonkers shouty bit (Lauren as Mark E Smith, only not) I think we'd all long gotten it, but I think they're still unsure of themselves, which is terribly sweet really.
The encore (such as it was, as Marie and X walked off and walked straight back on again) of Girls best Friend was great - Marie sounding curiously angelic, I never realised how beautiful her voice was. And then the reprise of Come Out 2Nite, X picks up his bag, and off they go. Short, then, but to the point, and perfectly formed. Kenickie, that is, not X. Although he is. I, erm, think.
I think the thing that stands out about it all the most was the buzz of the crowd leaving. Excitement, euphoria, anticipation of greater things to come, I dunno what it was, but even wandering out into the street and in the station there was a real sense of something special having happened. Which, of course, it did.
Board tube train with astonishingly attractive girl in Manics t-shirt. See Robbie Williams fans in pedal pushers. Head for home.
Get home. Have five hours sleep. Get up. Go to work. Hello there!
Floss
(*) At least, I think it was them. Brown Sauce being a supergroup comprised of the stars of TV's Multi Coloured Swap Shop, ie Noel Edmonds, Keith Chegwin and Maggie Philbin. I'm not making this up.
(**) I suspect that there wasn't that much wrong with Lauren's voice, truth be told, and that the band just wanted to move the Wolverhampton gig closer to the festivals. But this is just idle speculation, and I am almost certianly wrong.
(***) At this stage in the evening I had the misfortune to stumble across some decrepid twat with a fearsome mullet, who seemed not to notice the surging of the crowd. As a result I crashed into him several times, which has left me with decidedly sore ribs this morning. Cheers. And should I see you, with your crap haircut, ever again, I, the most docile man in Britain, could do Very Bad Things Indeed. Really.
(****) Sorry.