Credit: Found On Internet

The Soho Revue Bar looks exactly like the kind of place that current transvestite night of the moment, Trannyshack is perfectly suited for a residence. The Weimar Vaudeville décor, chandeliers so ornate they are almost obscene in their tastelessness, and enough UV blacklights that Music Towers starts worrying that we might develop skin cancer.

But there’s still a couple of hours till Trannyshack kicks off for those so inclined. Right now its filling with a growing number of men with haircuts worrying close to that of uber-Housemartins fan, Jack Penate. Glasgow-via-London-types, Parka, are here for a gig in front of a select audience of industry-types and competition winners. Music Towers times our entrance perfectly, glad to miss almost the entire identikit support act wheeled out to support the Glasgow boys tonight. Apart from the bass player, who looks and moves just like Van Halen’s bass player Michael Anthony did in the 1980s, they’re so nondescript they might as well of pitched up and played at a different venue entirely, such was the lack of attention they provoked.

The design of venue’s cabaret-style stage almost promotes the Ring of Death, that zone at the front of the stage that no fan wants to be seen entering, Parka make it their mission to fill it by the end of their set.

Opening with ‘Bosses and Bastards’, Parka kick Music Towers’ initial expectations in the side of the head, by endearing to sound like a mash-up of Hot Chip and Franz Ferdinand, given a remix treatment by !!!. Frontman Matty jitters and scats his vocals over the beats, and the crowd seems to be transfixed on the stage as if by some hidden subliminal pulse. Things head back in the direction we were initially expecting with the second song, ‘Mr Optimistic’. Arguably cut from the same lairy-indie cloth as Reverend and The Makers and The Fratellis, thank fuck-fully it’s noticeably less beer-breathed than either.

It’s far from perfect though – the lyrics of ‘Hoxton Hair’ are so deliberately we-might-live-here-but-we’re-not-part-of-the-East-London-fashionista-set to be fully cringe-worthy. Lamenting about the trendier than thou types and ramming home how they’re just being a bunch of Scottish Boys in London (name-checking such scenester haunts as the Old Blue Last along the way) is the kind of teenage-sounding too-cool-for-school petulance you don’t expect outside of a Battle of the Bands.