Credit: Have you Seen This Man?

I don’t like Proud Galleries at the best of times. It’s got less visibility than Helen Keller sleepwalking. The lighting rig seems angled to spend as much time blinding the audience as illuminating the stage. And it is always, without fail, full of wankers. However, it is one of the many places under threat from the property deal that Kate Nash et al have been raising awareness of this week, and the promise of a trio of big and/or interesting acts playing on a Friday night, Music Towers took the plunge and ventured into the den of people who look like they’re going suspiciously out of their way to out-cool each other.

So it was still with some minor trepidation that we squeezed into the live room of the Camden scenester hangout for The Ghost Frequency. The room is packed with the young and the fashionably coiffured. Everyone looks like the cast of Skins but fast-forwarded a few years so they can drink without needing fake IDs.

But rather than just being something to file under A.N.Other Electro-Indie Combo, The Ghost Frequency hammer out songs with danceable rhythms because it works, not because “hey, everyone else was doing it”. Sounding like the wicked younger brother of Franz Ferdinand, who instead of plagiarising Talking Heads melodies  like big brother, was out popping pills and listening to Wire and Devo. The Ghost Frequency have got a significant slice of the audience dancing, despite next to no-one really knowing any of their material.

With songs as strong as current single ‘Nightmare’ littering their brief set, its no surprise though. Frontman Doran is perching on anything that can give him a little extra altitude so he can interact with more of the crowd. Unlike most of their scenester contemporaries, if anything they seem eager to entertain the crowd, rather than behaving like the assembled throng somehow owe them something.

Proud has somehow managed to build a reputation for hosting “secret” gigs by acts bigger than a venue its size could usually justify. I’m sure this is in part due to the fact that the Year Zero club (as tonight is monikered) is run by one Mark Beaumont, Chief Shit-Stirrer of the NME.