No Mo', Please

Last night's Eurovision was good fun, eh? Thank God that UK atrocity didn't win, I'd have had to have emigrated. Anyone else notice that the Finnish vocalist looked like a cross between Eminem and Tommy Boyd?

Anyway, here's an old review from when The X was a fun pub where they had free music, before it became a flashy proper music venue. After this, of course, it became a bankrupt proper music venue, and then a terribly terribly run music venue, and now it's a curry house. Quite a good one, I'm told.

If you're wondering, Mac is a local live sound engineer who is absolutely lovely, but could duff the likes of me up in about 6 seconds flat.

MOFO, The X, 29/2/05

Mofo is a terrible name for a band. Then agian with its wigga air of bullishness, unsubtlety and inauthenticity, maybe it's a an excellent name for a terrible band. I hesitate to give them a bad review, because the drummer is one of the hardest looking men I've ever seen (imagine Mac after a serious course of steroids and a couple of deep fried feral leopards), but the truth must be told.

Mofo is a classic rock covers band. Now, I often find myself defending the principle of covers bands: from the classical recital to the jazz standard, to punk's ravaging of the rock 'n' roll songbook, there are many ways in which a musician can perform familiar material and make it matter. However, welding feet to monitors, hiring a dry ice machine and stomping through a bunch of predictable rockers with all the grace and elegance of a beery burp is not one of them.

But nobody's told Mofo yet. Yes, they can clearly play well, but they're so anonymous that they may actually have forgotten their own names. The vocalist is even worse, reminding me of local horror Pete Fryer. In fairness, he can sing a little better than Fryer, but shares with him a complete lack of charm and musical interpretation.

Listen, The Darkness may not be the greatest joke that post-modern pop has come up with, but surely opening your set with a sodden rendition of "I Believe In A Thing Called Love" by a man with no falsetto must be classed as missing the point. Similarly, "All Along The Watchtower" is a song that was forged in the mystic crucible of Dylan and mutated in the fuilthy laboratory of Hendrix - making it sound like a cross between Gary Moore and Whitesnake should be a capital offence.

In fact, every song sounds like a cross between Gary Moore and Whitensake, and one gets the impression that Mofo really can't tell the difference between the swagger of The Stones, the sneer of The Pistols and the hilarity of Motley Crue...which has got to be a drawback for a covers band, wouldn't you think? Never has the phrase "culturally bankrupt" seemed so apposite.

Then again, it's Saturday night, we're down the pub, entry was free, the band are passable and the tunes are good: maybe, just maybe, it's me that's missing the point after all...