Credit: Alex Lake - from Bettys Myspace page

The Pigalle Club, Piccadilly

Tuesday 13 March 2007

Betty Curse is awful. Irrevocably, indiscriminately awful. I think it’s only fair that I signpost this review as clearly as possible before you go any further.

A gaggle of MySpace fans have been herded into the plush Pigalle Club in London’s Piccadilly, watered with a brace of free drinks, for this latest push of the pop-goth irritant, Betty Curse. Everyone has been shepherded to the base of the stage, in an effort to encourage people to at least look like they’re taking an interest.

Betty Curse had a moderately firm push by their label last year, to the stony indifference of the wider rock community. Collectively, everyone whose music collection stretched beyond the squeakiest of pop guff, mumbled something about having something better to do and left her to her over-dramatisms with as little fuss as possible. With the album out as a download since October, the label is gearing up for a physical release, in the hope that people might care this time around.

Her band of hired guns – who squeeze out the kind of cod-US-college rock that probably sound amazing if you think AC/DC is a kind of alphabet soup - are dolled up into dandyish uniforms. Swap the black leather jackets of The Ramones for some foppish ruffs and you’re halfway to the sheer idiocy of it. It’s a clinically cynical ploy to ride the My Chemical Romance wagon, with touching nods to the swathes of tweenage weekend Goths.

It’s symptomatic that her new single is called “Do You Mind If I Cry?” It’s music for simpletons. I’m not going to berate the quality of the lyrics as of the level of Sixth Form poetry – with lines like “Do you care that I fell in despair? Do you mind if I cry one more time?” it’s clear that we’re dealing with something purely pre-school.

Pouting like a chinchilla being suffocated in taffeta, Betty herself shows all the signs of being a simulacrum of a real rock star as she winks and flounces through “Girl With Yellow Hair”. It’s no secret that this is a constructed act – with songs co-written by members of failed indie mob Little Hell and even Davey McManus of The Crimea – but the sheer fakery of it goes beyond a veneer. In a scene where “realness” is the most valued quality after musicianship, Betty Curse’s blatant artificiality is their biggest weakness. Even more so than the terrible, terrible songs.