Credit: Louie

Live at the 100 Club

Supported by Fear of Flying, Kid Harpoon

24/05/06

When the lights gave out during Fear of Flying’s first song, forcing the engineer behind the desk to ad-hoc light the stage for the remainder of the song with a torch, you just knew that it wasn’t going to go their way tonight.

If some kind of musical Frankenstein of the trends were to construct a band out of the choice cuts of everything that’s “in” this week, Fear of Flying would be the result. It starts out like a bit of steroid-pumped version of The Smiths, with guitarist Harry McVeigh’s vocals a bit hollow and flavourless. Three songs in and it’s the almost-obligatory-these-days beefed up rip-off of The Cure time to make an appearance in a song.

By the time they’re on to their fourth song, their drummer has found the time to liberally swig from a carton of Ribena while banging his synthpad, and McVeigh is reminding us for the however-many time what all the song titles were. I can see why he kept repeating himself now – their sheer averageness has wiped my memory clean of his verbal bumblings entirely.

Doesn't help that the McVeigh is so void of charisma that lost ancient Inca civilisations could hide in it and there’d still be enough empty space to hear the echo of people shouting that he’s just trying to rip off Brendan Flowers. You could go and take a shit, come back, and be none the wiser to any musical progress having taken place on stage from the three-piece. 

Their final song thieved so unashamedly from the Futureheads I thought one of the staff might’ve started the PA system early. It's all competently inconsequential to any and all music with balls that’s going somewhere new.

Kid Harpoon, a one-man nu-country/folk (but not nearly as teeth-grindingly awful as that sounds) act clambers on stage and virtually apologises for being there. He squints against the now-full-glare lights (apparently they’re not taking any chances after the earlier visual glitch) and when he asks “how you all doin’?” there’s a sense that he almost means it for real, instead of it just being a mouthed platitude that every musician mouths when facing a fresh crowd.