Once again, due to my habit of intentionally ignoring everything NME has to say with fingers in my ears and a loud, ‘Blah blah blah, The Skids, blah blah blah…’ I have been rather slow on the uptake with this band, but bear with me.

   I first stumbled across them supporting Florence & The Machine at Hammersmith Apollo.  They were preceded by an almost 50s-style scene with an outbreak of banshee screaming and one girl behind me, fanning herself in preparation for lead singer Jonathan Pierce to come onstage, exclaiming with no hint of irony, ‘Oh he’s so dreamy!’ By the time they came on my eyebrows had almost disappeared into my fringe in disbelief, especially when the legendary Johnny finally entered the stage, dressed like someone doing ‘dandy schoolboy’ in a satirical play with a haircut so retro I questioned whether it could be real.

   Once they started playing however, in a charming and raw style that bought to mind an optimistic and camp version of Joy Division, I not only started to like them, but I started to find Johnny inexplicably attractive within about three songs. By the end of their set I may have even flailed while saying, ‘Oh, I love him!’ On the one hand there’s his dancing, which alternates between an Ian Curtis-esque shuffle and a flourish of Adam Ant-style posturing. While part of you wants to dismiss him as a tragic indie car crash, a more overwhelming part of you knows that he’s cool enough to get away with it. On the other hand though there is his singing, which is undeniably strong, able to express both irony and charm.

   Then there is the issue of their stage door persona, a tripping point for any band, where an arrogant attitude or a snappy comment can put me off a band’s music for life. I saw his fringe before I saw him, and hoped that someone else would stop him considering I didn’t know his name at the time and I wanted a smoother opener than, ‘Guy from the drums!’  Luckily someone obliged and Johnny took a round of obligatory photos before I chipped in with a devastatingly cool, ‘Excuse me…’ I am glad to say that, despite the onstage strut, he was one of the most polite musicians I have ever met. Upon my camera breaking he insisted on waiting until we had got a photo I was happy with, even offering to fix it while his arm was still around me. Allow me a moment to sigh…

   After the gig I bought their recent EP, Summertime! It comes across as the polar opposite of their live sound, but that is no bad thing. Songs like Let’s Go Surfing, Make You Mine and Best Friend (from their Best Friend EP) sound like they were produced on a jaunty, aged 60s record. Live they sounded like a hyperactive 80s throwback, torn between punk and cheesy pop. Johnny’s energy is contained in a way that it can’t be onstage, but the effect is a blissful, upbeat and surprisingly original record.

   The real star of the show is the last track of the EP, I Felt Stupid. It’s a song that could have leapt straight from a musical, like Hairspray or Grease, only…decent. It’s almost unbearably charming, but so touching and sincere it’s hard not to succumb to visions of Johnny, in his rolled-up trousers and white socks, singing ‘I don’t know if it’s right or wrong but come stay with me, I wanna hear every beat of your heart’ to you across a US diner…or maybe that’s just me, but you get my point.

   The Drums are playing two nights at Heaven, London, in early June. Go. They’re lovely, captivating live, have two very strong EPs, and the tickets on Ebay are reasonably priced. Please, do go.

PS - Sorry for the extended break. It will never happen again, cross my heart…

This is not a review. It cannot be a review. A review is meant to sum up a gig succinctly and accurately, and I can do neither. The more she gives of herself, the more the clothes come off and the singles shoot to an automatic number one, the more mystique she seems to command.

   To see her live is to take leave of your reality, pitch up in the Monster Ball and prepare yourself for an onslaught of images, music, films, narrative, glitter, blood, giant monsters, underground bars, neon signs, forests, subway trains, fountains, harps, burning pianos, and thousands of clawed hands moving in unison.

   There are moments where you feel, rather melodramatically, that you’re partaking in some sort of revolution, something that has too much energy for the arena to contain and will surely spill out onto the streets at any second to sweep the country, the sea, the world, and everything will fall to Gaga’s twisted beautiful fantasies.

   On the other hand, especially during her two-song stint at the burning piano, there are moments where you feel like this is a gig performed directly to you. “This is for everyone who has ever hurt you, when you’ve been hurt so, so bad…” she shouted during Brown Eyes, and for a moment she’s feeling that pain for you. Lady Gaga is a walking dichotomy, revelling in the superficial while remaining completely sincere. When she says “When you’re lonely, I’m lonely too,” you believe her.

   For those who got too caught up in the sentimentality, the twenty-foot tentacled fish with glowing razor teeth that took over the stage during Paparazzi, quickly broke the reverie. Gaga, dressed in a futuristic green dress of 3D diamonds, writhed on the floor screaming, “Eat me, motherfucker!” while the crowd stared, transfixed.

   “Do you think I’m sexy?” Gaga asked after powering through Boys Boys Boys, the song during which her troupe of semi-clad dancers were at their most distracting, thrusting and massaging exaggerated cod-pieces. “I wasn’t cool at school, so I abuse it a little…” Gaga continued, running her hands up and down her toned silhouette. “Do you think I’m sexy?”

   Sexy almost seems too trite to describe the visceral sexuality that dominates the show. Her every move oozes sex but, unlike the majority of women in the pop charts, she doesn’t use it to hide a lack of talent, which is as overt and flamboyant as any of her (many) outfits.

   While the worldwide anthems of Just Dance, Poker Face and Bad Romance make it impossible to resist dancing in the most embarrassing and crazed way, the way usually reserved for family wedding receptions, it’s the album tracks such as Fame, Teeth, Monster, and the little-known Vanity, that provided unexpected highlights. Vanity was delightfully reminiscent of Moulin Rouge gone wrong, with the can-can lines and theatrical celebration of hedonism.

   But in front of an audience Gaga can’t hide behind lyrics like “All we care about is runway models, Cadillacs and liquor bottles”.

   “You set me free,” she said while at her piano, showing off her classically trained background. “If it wasn’t for all of you I wouldn’t have travelled around the world fifty times. I love my fans.” And she does love her fans, her little monsters that could be seen queuing over three streets to get inside.

   It’s fitting that one of her major influences is Freddie Mercury. This was a night that felt like Woodstock, like Live Aid, like a gig that would be looked back on for decades to come, but then, I suspect, every one of her gigs feel like this. Never before while watching someone onstage have I been compelled to worry, with a gut feeling of sadness, that some people might not get to witness talent like this in their lifetimes, that the world would be that little bit less colourful without her and her music in it.

   On emerging, sweating and walking on aching feet, from the venue after Bad Romance, I feel like days have passed, weeks even. Gaga’s Monster Ball was less like a set of songs and more like a trip to Narnia, during which you not only forget your watch but that anything outside of the venue even exists. Seeing roads and buildings again only makes you yearn to re-enter her world.

   That day Telephone became her sixth consecutive US number one. Maybe that is her mission, to drag this world, dancing and screaming, into hers?

   There was a pink sky over Cardiff when I caught my 6:30am train out the next morning.

   Of course there was.

There will be a review here soon, of Lady Gaga at the Cardiff CIA, maybe even in the next day or so if I’m on form. It puts into perspective how hard writing can be, how limiting your own language is, when you can’t find any word to describe how mindblowing, how spectacular, how iconic, and how inhuman in her performing perfection Lady Gaga really is. There are no words, just a pang of genuine sadness that I’ll probably never witness another gig like that again, worry that someone who burns so strongly and so brightly can’t persist at her momentum, nostalgia that would be more fitting for Woodstock or Live Aid, and bewilderment, wonder at how something could fall to earth with such talent.

   The Madonna comparisons are shown up to be lazy and uninformed. Her influences such as David Bowie and Freddie Mercury are far more fitting. Lady Gaga, in every sense, is the Spider From Mars. She is Lady Stardust. She is the spirit of hundreds and thousands of people clapping in time to Radio Gaga in 1985.

   There will be a review here, but consider this a pre-review, a reaction, a desperate need to expel the effects of last night onto a page without regards for cohesion or order.

   There will be words. Later. But I may have to invent new ones.

Let’s get this straight. I am vehemently against new bands and prone to reading NME articles in WH Smith with a look of superior disgust on my face before walking home to a soundtrack of Oasis and David Bowie.

   However, once in a while, I stumble across someone who genuinely excites me, who can induce a strange Tourettes-like state whereby I recount the artist/band’s name plus a rambling stream of trivia at people I barely know.

   “Don’t you think Tom Clarke from The Enemy sounds like the love-child of Johnny Lydon and a young Paul Weller?”

   “That’s very nice, miss, but the newspaper is a pound…”

   You get the idea.

   So, Delphic. My first impression of them wasn’t the best, as the second support act before Kasabian at Myspace’s celebratory gig in Heaven, London. Their roadies took a monstrous hour and a half to set up their equipment, pushing Kasabian towards a 23:00 start that would cause me to miss my train. It wasn’t the band’s fault, but I was determined not to enjoy them. They could have come onstage dressed as Cuban revolutionaries on the shoulders of Joe Strummer and I still would have glared at them, silently, arms crossed across the barrier, and muttering about Kasabian all set. In much the same way that I wilfully ignore any band hyped by NME, I chose not to hear them.

   Fast-forward three months and a friend offered me a ticket to a gig of theirs not twenty minutes down the road. Pressured by her enthusiasm and the reasonable price I agreed and, with somewhat less enthusiasm, bought the album, Acolyte.

   It starts with Clarion Call. This opener, like the album itself, starts deceptively quiet before building into something so preposterously epic for a debut that it will have you jamming your head into the speakers, screaming, “More! Moooooore, I say!”

   There are echoes of New Order but no imitation, just pure electro-pop brilliance. Disregard the fact that one of the keyboard players looks like Gary Neville finding his true calling and focus on songs like This Momentary, that are almost hypnotic in their quality. Their vocalist and guitarist has a voice of appealing fragility, but capable of unexpected power, especially in Doubt and Submission.

   Doubt also demonstrates the simple intelligence of the lyrics. Without any of the clichés or laddish posturing that a lot of new bands succumb to, Doubt is a sincere and gentle attack of electro-beats and guitar.

   The real gem of the album however is the single, Halcyon. Halcyon is the sort of song with a chorus so catchy, so flawless, so painfully gorgeous, that I could be tempted to withdraw from society completely and sit, alone, ipod plugged into the wall with it on repeat for the rest of my life, rocking backwards and forwards with my hands over the earphones, salivating like a modern-day Gollum. When I heard Halcyon for the first time I forgot that other music existed for about three days, and it was only due to a technical fault and an accidental switch to Alabama 3 that I remembered, for the sake of my sanity and social appearance, that I would have to listen to other songs once in a while.

   Acolyte has managed to temporarily drag my cynical heart out of the 70s and, were it not for the narrow-minded attitude of Western civilisation, I would elope with one of its tracks and fulfil its every sexual need.

   I haven’t been to their gig yet, but I’m sure I’ll dance like a lunatic.

   Buy it. For the love of God, buy it.

John and Edward Grimes.

   No, really.

   You may think that I’ve finally lost my mind and turned to hallucinogenic drugs to get myself through life but, really, I haven’t. I’m being 100% serious. Or as serious as you can be when talking about these identical quiffed Irish invaders of the UK Charts.

   I’ll put it concisely: I adore Jedward, and this is my case as to why.

   After much moaning, raised eyebrows, sighs, and restrained cynicism, I agreed to take my little sister and cousin to see X Factor Live. It was, in my eyes, nothing more than a poor reason to miss Manchester United winning the Carling Cup Final and a blemish to my rock ’n’ roll credentials. I was prepared to listen to nothing but The Skids for a week as penance to reclaim my kudos.

   If anyone had told me that the endearingly tuneless twins John and Edward would steal the show I’d have dismissed them as someone who needed to quickly see the inside of a padded cell. But, putting aside my hatred of X Factor and its stranglehold on the music industry as we know it, they did.

   John and Edward, I realised, represent more of a two-fingered salute to X Factor than Rage Against The Machine’s Christmas Number One did. They are the contraband box of ecstasy pills in The Priory, the sly injection of chaos that turns a peaceful protest into a full-on riot. They sing passably, by no means well, but became bigger than the show that made them with nothing more than reckless optimism and a euphoric hyperactivity both onstage and off. Through a combination of national pride and public frustration with the generic manure that reality TV propels into our consciousness year after year, they have become stars. Not just pop stars doomed to live forever with the smoking brand of X Factor across their foreheads, but actual stars.

   To see them onstage is to have a seven-inch psychotic smile on your face and aching ribs for hours afterwards, because what you’re seeing isn’t a shopwork mannequin, it is two eighteen-year-old boys doing whatever the hell they want. From Under Pressure to Rock DJ to Ghostbusters, cavorting with water pistols and inflatable ghosts, one twin dancing slightly out of time with the other, talking in faux American accents, and dressed like the love-children of James Bond and Nicky Wire, they are undeniably joyous to witness.

   ”Have fun - that’s our plan at all times,” John recently said to Q Magazine. “When you look at some artists you can see there’s something missing when you look into their eye. They’re trudging through a performance. We’re thinking, Who’s let us on this stage? It’s just amaaaaazing. We’ll never lose the feeling that we’re the luckiest guys ever for being allowed near a stage.”

   Also, in a true rock ‘n’ roll initiation, they have Noel Gallagher’s mobile number and implied endorsement. “He’s been really supportive so we got his number and we’ve been texting him,” said Edward in the same interview. Now that is an exchange I would have paid money to see.

   They are rock ‘n’ roll. Those who complain that they can’t sing are missing the point. A non-believer friend remarked on their cover of Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure (that has shot to Number One in Ireland and Number Two in the UK) with a cold, “I bet Freddie Mercury is turning in his grave.”

   I’m not so sure. They may not have enough power between them to match even one of Freddie’s magnificent vocal chords, however they must represent everything positive that he once sang about. They are, in every sense, the champions. Hell, they are the Bohemian fucking Rhapsody.

   Freddie Mercury would not be turning in his grave to see these fellas doing what they so obviously love to do. He’d be dancing. 

No, I am not. Firstly, because considering the average age of their writers and target audience the sex wouldn’t even be legal. Secondly, because what was once the authority on the then-aspiring music genres of rap, reggae, punk rock, rock ‘n’ roll, metal, and pop, has shrivelled to a barely recognisable parody of its former self.
Flip to the reviews section and you’ll feel as though a gig, that could arguably have been as good as Woodstock, is being regaled to you by the gang of ASBO-touting monosyllabic teenagers at the end of the road who frighten old ladies and torture hamsters. It’s a desperate, fickle shouting contest garnished with many witty attempts at trying to drop a ‘Fuck’ into every paragraph. If it weren’t in print with the heading of NME, how many of you would let this rabble advise you on which albums to buy? Which gigs to go to?
“Alex Turner’s jeans are well tight ‘n’ they’ll blow your fucking head off!” “Cool, what was the music like?” “…Music?”
Music! Because that, at the end of the day, is what music magazines should be about, whether it is rock, pop or Irish New Wave reggae. That’s what this blog is for. There are many bands out there worth seeing and many albums worth buying, and I’d like to tell people about them.
I may not be the authority, but I’m fairly certain I could vomit something onto a blank page more literate, more comprehensive and more witty than the NME with my hands tied behind my back while being flogged by a naked Peter Mandelson…and it would probably result in someone buying a marginally better album than Lil Wayne. Know who he is? The NME do. I bet his jeans are well tight.