In the week that NME deigned to tell us who is cool and who is not, tonight serves as a warning to all those bands currently being poked at by the finger of fashion. Cool is like copper: shiny for a short while, it soon tarnishes. Listen up The Strokes. All bands have their day.
Support act Tetra Splendour are not cool and are unlikely ever to be cool, and may be all the better for that. They are a ragged and eccentric Welsh outfit, whose brief set wanders deep into the forest of prog, with brief poppy sunbeams poking through the dark. Their songs lack any discernible structure, with Beatles choruses rising near randomly from a mess of rumbling riffs and dense bass. They sound something like a less disciplined Supergrass, or a more interesting Boo Radleys, and by the time they leave the stage they've made some new friends.
New friends are exactly what Fun Lovin' Criminals need, and exactly what they are unlikely to find. There are enough fans in the audience - some rabid - to give the illusion that FLC are popular, but this is a band who are preaching to an ever shrinking converted.
FLC were cool once, part of the mid-nineties lurch towards Americana that revived Gap and led to the idolisation of Tarantino, but it's a cool that has long since fled the scene of the crime. Huey's ambling, amiable stage presence could be kindly viewed as louche, but it looks more stoned and sloppy from where dotmusic is standing. With his preposterous sunglasses and complacent double chin, he looks more like a drunk uncle at a wedding than the King of New York.
Worse still, the sound tonight is truly atrocious, a swamp that would bury even the best of songs. That FLC have somewhat less to offer than a frigid prostitute turns tonight into an ordeal. There are highlights, thankfully. 'Bombing the L' is swashbuckling fun, one of the few proud owners of a real chorus, whilst 'King of New York' is a big beast number that squalls around in a haze of stoned chic and hammers the listener into submission.
But nearly all else is lost in the gruesome sound. 'Up On The Hill' sounds like it may have a lovely melody, but finding it is another matter. On another number, Huey seems to beg for morphine and cocaine, but it could just as easily have been more tea and coffee. 'Scooby Snacks', a truly memorable song on record, is hideously disfigured.
By the end, it feels like you've just spent an hour being mumbled at by a stoned Greek pensioner with a penchant for Deep Purple and Grandmaster Flash. Sadly, nothing so interesting.
