The screams down the front - all girl, all lungpower - get it from the get-go. We need more Kelly Osbournes and we need them now.
In fact, the only thing more astonishing than Ms Osbourne tonight - blonde, breathless, looking like a million beaming bolshy bucks as her frankly great-looking girl/boy band rip flat-out through a gloriously headlong 'Disconnected' - is the thought, prevalent in grumpy dadtastic quarters, that this is some kinda barrel-scraping fame-by-association pop culture con-job.
Just shut, as Kelly would put it, up. Daughter-of, sure; reality-TV-boosted, yeah; eye-on-the-main-chance major label signing definitely - but she's absolutely the kind of performer we should be kicking our heels up at the sight of. Remember the fabled punk rock days when frontpeople were eighteen and giddy - and looked it? Remember when the musical role models served up to girls had something more full-blooded, fearless and joyous to offer than Avril Lavigne's sullen, listless AlternaTeen ™clotheshorse-isms?
For starters, the songs are the absolute business. And any dads who ever dribbled over Kim Wilde's 'Kids In America' - template for much of this, with a bucketload of added oomph -- should be drooling now.
Compositions-by-committee they may be, and grown-up committee at that, kicking Kelly's shrewd and hilarious one-liners firmly hookward, but you'd have to be half-dead and terminally all-dad not to revel in a sharp, pissed-off and funny 'Contradiction', the rocked-up shiny pop of 'Shut Up' delivered with the solar plexus punch of a sweaty teenage Gwen Stefani, the sharp-nailed Go-Gos-isms of 'Right Here' and a f*ck you 'Coolhead'. These are songs you can strap on and strut through, and Kelly, wrapped in a cropped trenchcoat and clearly having the time of her life, makes a meal of the entire, brilliantly-paced set.
And sure, her voice is as all over the shop as the inside of a teenager's mind, alternating between hoarse, wayward, sugar-sweet, and bellowingly irresistible (and none the worse for it). Throw in the sharp jokes about wan*ing (an endearingly lustful 'Too Much Of You'), a rendition of Corey Hart's petulant uber-Eighties 'classic' 'Sunglasses At Night', a loveable mum-daughter moment when Kelly drags Sharon on for a big goofy hug to preface 'More Than Life Itself', and a compulsive-viewing cabaret of giggles, eye-rolls, mirror-rehearsed vamping and unfeignable delight and what you've got is the kind of performance as rare and inspiring as it is - cue the cliché, but it's the right one - 4 Real.
Let a thousand stompy teenage flowers bloom, as Chairman Mao never said and the dadrockers frowning at the back would sooner die than admit. Try asking the girls down the front instead.
