Valentine Temple

I've lost not only the Word file for this review, but also the hard copy of the magazine it was in, so I'm typing this from a scrap of A4 paper that I found in the bottom of the reviews vault. Baby Gravy are growned up now, and are very good; Shirley are called Silvanito now, and are still fun; The Brothers never crossed my consciousness again after this night; The Shaker heights still play in Oxford every now and then, but I steer well clear.

SHIRLEY/ THE BROTHERS/ THE SHAKER HEIGHTS/ BABY GRAVY - The Point, The Zodiac

Young people are great. They have such belief that things will work out, no matter how implausible they look. Take teenage band Baby Gravy. They have the youthful fire to believe that they can start a sixpiece melding Sexy Breafast style prog pop with dubby bass, The Psychedelic Furs' sax parts and vocals in the vein of The Slits, and make it work. Of course, it doesn't work at all. It sounds like two bands playing two songs at once. Badly. But sometimes a noble failure is worth a hundred safe successes. Watch out for this lot, they could really surprise us, so long as they don't start taking the easy route.

Much as The Shaker Heights do. they could really use some of Baby Gravy's open-minded outlook. Their chiming, slightly drony rock is a bit like early U2 (if you're being kind) and a bit like The Velvet Underground's Loaded (if you're being saintly). Listening to them is like finding a pebble washed smooth by the sea: immediately pleasant to the senses, but ultimately forgettable and impossible to distinguish from others.

Oxford music is known for many things, but white funnk is not one of them, which makes The Brothers an unusual proposition. They burst onto the stage in a flurry of mid-80s funk rhythms and oodles of glistening Rhodes, headed by a frontman strutting about like a bantam impersonating John Inman. At times it's somewhat uninspired, but the best tracks sound like The Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" played in the style of Beck's Midnite Vultures LP, which is something you don't see every day.

Shirley's music is a frightening mixture of Bryan Adams, Los Lobos and McFly wth occasional Santana guitar solos and fists aloft choreography. Risible on paper, but in a weird inversion of the Baby Gravy principle, Shirley get away with it by putting in the hard work. Thus their songs are impeccably arranged, convincingly performed and all a neat two minutes long, with barely enough space for their adulatory fans to catch a breath in between. Four grown men throwing shapes and singing about their outlaw status is clearly ridiculous, and Shirley's relentless chirpiness is guaranteed to make the more straight-faced music fan physically sick, but I'll admit they made me grin for thrity minutes. Which is no mean feat, when you think about it.

Inimitable Vowel Syndrome

This was my first review for Nightshift, a few years ago now. I miss The Point promotion. I miss The Zodiac venue. I miss The E Band's silliness. Pretty ambivalent about the memory of AOS, I'm afraid.

THE E BAND/ ASSASSINS OF SILENCE, The Point, The Zodiac

Enter, unexpectedly at a Friday night Point event, The Assassins Of Silence, a Hawkwind tribute act. Reviewing a tribute act without deep foreknowledge of the tributee is always dangerous work, but it must be said that the gig was rather more tame than I was epxecting. There may have been some dayglo amps, but where were the galaxy-swallowing synth washes? Where were the nebula-destroying phase pedals? Isn't this sort of mid-paced blues wailing just one small step away from facile roadhouse boogie? The Assassins are nice and tight, and play with an obvious respect for the canon they've adopted, but if this is spacerock it felt oddly earthbound. Esteemed passangers, take off has been delayed indefinitely; we shall be serving complimentary lemon scented napkins shortly.

In complete contrast, The E Band's music is open-ended and intriguing. They may only play in one key (no prizes for guessing) but manage a fair range of effects. The formula is simple: the guitar, bass and brass apparently improvise over an electronic backing, whilst a melancholy monologue is recited over the top. Clearly this could have turned into a 6th form exercise in self-congratulatory "experimentation", but luckily the beats could rock blocks in six dimensions, the guitarists wove variegated textures, and the vocals had a real sense of quiet drama. And they had a trombone, which is something we can't encourage enough.

Time will tell if this is a musical one-liner or a serious endeavour, but The E Band certainly have a knack with freeform soundscapes. In the end we got a little psychedelia after all.