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.

The Prong Remains The Same

Do you know, when I looked at this review, I had no recollection of writing it. None whatever. Although wierdly I recall the actual gig quite well. Funny how the old mind works, eh? This, if I remember correctly (and we've proved there's no guarantee of that) was the last time I saw Fork, as they split up soon after. Pity, they were just beginning to get good. Still, all together now: This could be the last tine...

FORK/ SHIRLEY/ EMERALD SKY/ THE RELATIONSHIPS – THE X 17/11/06

Exquisitely English indie janglers The Relationships write the most perfect pop songs in Oxford. They look like they presented schools’ science programmes in 1983, but they create the sort of elegant chiming little anthems that may have sprung up if The Byrds, R.E.M.and Noel Coward had all been signed to Postcard Records. Their inherent politeness does risk being as rock and roll as crustless cucumber sarnies, but is salvaged by the fine balance between the writing’s crafted melancholy and the barely controlled rock beast that is drummer Tim Turan. OK, they’re not as good on stage as they are on record, but very few in this town are likely ever to be.

Emerald Sky are a Cambridge-based female cock rock trio (notebooks out, anatomists) who seem to play Oxford every twenty minutes. Clearly certain promoters hear more in their AC/DC Zepellin approximations than we. Their full fat hammer-on rocking is amusing enough, but palls after repeated hearings. Emerald Sky are admittedly fun, but so is drunken Twister, and we wouldn’t give that a good review.

We’ve been fairly lukewarm in our reception of Shirley in the past, and we’d just like to say this: we were wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Shirley are a brilliant party band. Whilst it’s tough for demi-Gods like us to admit mistakes, the blow is softened by some of the most infectiously euphoric cod-latin pop-rock on the planet. Replete with piercing snare stabs and helium-light acoustic riffing, Shirley’s songs are tight, bouncy and compact enough to make Buddy Holly look like King Crimson. Admittedly the vocals don’t quite gel tonight, but the rhythm section sounds crisper than ever. We even tapped our feet for a bit, readers, it was that enjoyable.

Fork have been confusing audiences for a while now, by fusing six-string funk basslines onto tinny little punk frames. If this sounds like a recipe for a huge mess, for a while it was, but Fork have been improving steadily over the past year. This is partly due to the addition of Tim from Junkie Brush on drums, who adds not only a much needed sense of structure, but also cheeky roto-tom action. Also, leader James Serjeant has seemingly realised that he has a negligible range and changed his vocals to a malevolent hiss that works remarkably well. Yes, they could do with more like the abstract lounge-jazz of “How Do I Get Out Of Here?”, but Fork are moving in the right direction: if they aren’t quite there yet, we’re at least enjoying the ride.