Credit: Vincent Vincent & The Villians

16/07/2006
Denmark Street

You can hear it as far away as Holborn. For those of you without a tube map stitched into the fabric of your brain, that noise is shaking the city of London for a kilometre in every direction. Denmark Street, who’s nickname of Tin Pan Alley the one-dayer has lifted, is usually a mecca of half-true muso-history squeezed between a brace of guitar shops, but today a stage is blocking one end of the street off, turning the street into an intimate outdoor gig setting It’s the only festival where you might have to move as a lamp post is blocking your view of the stage, and it was all free in aid of Shelter.

One of the first bands on, Kalev have a kind of rolling, 80s-Matchbox personality but with the psychobilly-excess polished down with a gallon of Mr Sheen and fuzzbox electronica. Their steady hypno-pulse of “Undoing” is enough to overcome the mid-afternoon slump of the Sunday hangover.

Next up are the full-on and fan-feted Louie, who seem to treat every gig like they’re being held hostage on pain of death if they don’t put on a showstealing performance. Firing off pogo-pusher tracks like “Trees”, “Dead Man” and the cheek-slappingly good “The Curves And The Bends” into the sunshine, their debut album cannot come quick enough. Jordan Smith baits the crowd, and is clearly as confused as the rest of us at the large motor park in front of stage right: “Who the fuck brings a car to a festival?”

By the end of their all-too brief set, that still manages to hammer in a half dozen songs that everyone seems to know, beer and water are flying out from everywhere as people throw themselves about to the frenetic rhythms. And the band just rightly loves it.

After such a good show, we can only come down, and the awful artrock mincing of The Violets was never going to beat the Northern sextet. They might moan about the Debbie Harry comparisons, but perhaps lifting your stage presence whole from a Blondie performance circa-Parallel Lines isn’t the best way to break that line of lazy journalism. While singer Alexis probably thinks that she looks the epitome of nu-London cool by never taking her shades off, to the crowd it just seems the band is as aloof and at as arms length as the cold, synthetic sounds of “Mirror Mirror”.