The next time some middle-youth in marketing with a Clash album starts bemoaning the lack of attitude amongst today's young musicians, tell them about this gig. It's a night for heroes and idiots, the most intensely funny couple of hours for an age, and an unusually good justification for why a bunch of scabby whippets should occasionally be released from the toilet circuit and set on the music business.
If the success of The Strokes, The White Stripes and The Hives last year has meant anything, it's encouraged slightly confused major label A&Rs to make some, shall we say, risky investments. Exhibit A: Brighton's Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, signed to Virgin subsidiary Radiate (home of Haven, for God's sake) possibly because the singer looks eerily like Richard Ashcroft. He moves a bit like the young Ashcroft too, like Mick Jagger underwater.
Surely, though, Virgin can't have signed them for the music. For the Eighties brilliantly resemble the kind of obstreperous indie noise f**ks last seen in a Camden swamp a decade ago. Sometimes they sound like Silverfish and Big Flame and, at their most accessible, The Birthday Party. Briefly, they sound like King Kurt, too, but we're trying to keep that quiet. Perversely fantastic, though, and there's a great game to be played guessing which three of these five mohawked, mad-eyed squatpunks are Buddhists. My money's on the singer banging himself on the head shouting "I am the son of God", for a start.
For the past 20 years, southern Europe has produced thousands of terrible, terrible punk bands to be laughed at by sophisticated dogs like us. Why, then, Portugal's The Parkinsons should have fame thrust upon them is a bit bewildering. In their minds, as they take their CBGB shirts off and jump into the crowd, they're The Stooges or The Dead Boys. In practice, sadly, they're The Lurkers or Sham 69, only without the finesse. Obviously, this is quite funny for a while, as the bassist does rubbish Sid impressions, the guitarist keeps sniffing his armpit and the scrawny punk cliché of a singer has the hypocrisy to threaten the audience for spitting on him. But only a final drawn-out howl through 'Scientists' stops them from being utter novelties. As the Eighties proved, noise and a cavalier disregard for tunes is far more radical than getting your cocks out.
Ikara Colt look the most conventional of the three bands, in their indie-mod jackets and gently ruffled hair. But they have a clever trick: take the manic angles of early Fall, the insurrectionist yelp of Huggy Bear, and then add big, fuzzy, turbocharged guitar over the top. Essentially, this is spindly, frail, spiteful indie given psychotic rock'n'roll clout - a marvellous idea, riotously performed. This is the way a genuinely exciting evening ends, then. Ikara Colt shouting and staggering around, joined onstage first by random divebombing Parkinsons, then by about 50 gibbering members of the audience, and finally by a couple of broadly shellshocked bouncers. First we take the Garage, then we march on Starsailor. . .
