***Published November 2010
One minute and twenty five seconds of their set opener ‘Wreckin’ Bar’ is all that The Vaccines needed to snare the attention of every soul at The Cornerhouse that night. Similarly six months, a few tracks on the web and a badly exposed photograph of a girl with her face out of view was all it took for them to cause the same buzz that hit The Strokes, The Libertines and even The XX not so long ago.
‘Hello we’re The Vaccines from London, and this is...a song’ says singer Justin Young three or four songs in to the set before dancing across the stage and almost taking out his guitarist. Their presence in the room is striking enough to improve the mood tenfold the moment they hit the stage. It’s seems like the band have realised very early on that taking pop music seriously is about as silly as taking a goldfish for a walk.
It’s their direct sound, thick with irony and reverb that keeps causing comparisons to the great gun wielding pop-producer of the 60’s Phil Spector. Now any idiot could tell you that punk and indie has been borrowing from Phil’s formula since the late seventies, but The Vaccines are not The Jesus and Mary Chain and they are certainly not The Ramones; they’re just The Vaccines, and that’s what’s so bloody exiting about them
It’s all over very quickly, the set lasts around twenty minutes before the band run off the stage and outside the venue to hand out free T-shirts from the back of their Transit van. I asked Justin (who used to perform acoustically under the alias of Jay Jay Pistolet and tour with Mumford and Sons) what he made of the Phil Spector comparisons. 'Flattered' he said before talking animatedly about Spector’s work with various girl-groups and his influence on The Beach Boys. He seemed genuinely dumbfounded that so many people were interested in meeting him after only their eighth gig.
That’s right, it’s only their eighth gig - most bands this young arrive at venues like this to play to the barstaff and the support acts. It’s easy to be suspicious of hype like this but watching them play live genuinely felt like watching something special unfold.
No comments:
Post a Comment