Bearded and begoggled and perched upon a stool, it's pretty hard to believe that the leather-faced old growler we've crammed into the Garage to listen to tonight is the same dinghy-lipped piece of teen-meat tyro that launched a thousand bad hair bands getting on for 30 long years ago.
David Johansen might mean jack-sh*t in today's wipe-clean pop kitchen but go flick through your Dad's old collection of Frighten the Folks Monthly and you'll find the ex-lead singer of the New York Dolls sucking in his cheeks somewhere between the Rolling Stones and the bare-faced rip-off that were the Pistols.
So what happened? Quite simply he got old. He got old and decided in fact to stay alive unlike his old Doll's mucker Johnny Thunders whose desperate pathetic playing of the junkie pin-up riff finally whacked him out for good. Nope, David Johansen was a lot brighter than that. He grew up, shunned the Punk's Not Dead cabaret circuit and turned instead to the music that was his first love when he ran with a gang growing up on Staten Island: the Blues.
It's a real shame then that not everybody can move on with such grace. As Johansen pulls us into his new weather-beaten world with a luscious take on Lightnin' Hopkins' 'Darling, Do You Remember Me' the first murmurs of disgruntlement start. Yep, it looks like a glamorama thrash through old Doll's standards might not actually be on the cards here. Being ten years since he last played London it's clear that some people were not looking to hear grizzly authentic takes on the music of Mississippi John Hurt and Leadbelly when the prodigal punk son finally showed his a*s again.
Which is a real f**king shame as tonight's show was one of those rare special nights when a genuine crackle of something timelessly indefinable ignites the air. Old punks are like pearly kings and queens and they came here tonight to a have a right old punky knees up to their own spiky equivalent of Roll Out the Barrel.
There's no sadder t**ser than an old t**ser who should know better and David Johansen proved that by showing just how cool it can be instead to age with grace. Like Nick Cave he might have dropped some of the more obvious and flashy shows of fury that once made him such a physically mesmerising performer but he proved without doubt here that less can very much be more. And then he unleashed a stripped-down achingly tender reworking of the Doll's 'Looking For A Kiss' and I'm sure even the dissenters were won over. And if not f**k 'em. There's always the endless UK Subs tours for them to look forward to...
IMAGES: ANGELA LUBRANO
