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London's Hammersmith Palais is the last place I thought I'd find myself in. Home to the abominable and worryingly perverted-yet-accepted club night where students and twenty-somethings dress up as school kids on the game, it's not been home to proper, regular rock gigs since the heady days of the '80s when REM and U2 were treading its sweaty boards.
Still, here we are, the night after the NME Awards, and ironically, the four-band line-up wouldn't have been out of place 25, nay 30+ years ago, such is the retro flavour of their music. Due to unforeseen circumstances we missed The Ordinary Boys, but judging by The Jam facsimile of their debut single and their recent sounding off in the press about headliners Jet, perhaps this was not the end of the world.
Next come Las Vegan art-rock quartet, The Killers. With their sharp suits and waistcoated frontman (the delightfully named Brandon Flowers), they could be mistaken for Interpol, if it wasn't for the fact that Mr Flowers likes to spruce up each track with a heavy dose of '80s New Romantic keyboard. Sometimes the keys sound bizarre, sometimes they add a different flavour to what is otherwise a fairly run-of-the-mill concoction, but the overall conclusion is that Jarvis needs to get his Pulp gang together again quickly and show the pretenders how it's really done. Take note, Scissor Sisters.
And so to new Scouse mob on the block, The Stands, whose Here She Comes Again single has just hit the UK Top 30. Perhaps predictably given its title, Here She Comes Again is not unlike the classic There She Goes by fellow Liverpudlians, The Las. Its summery harmonies nestle very nicely in their half-hour set, which is composed of '60s-influenced numbers that veer from the pure Bob Dylan (complete with replica harmonica) to the rather obvious reference point of early Beatles.
It's good stuff mind, and even if the jam in the final song is a little overwrought (two drum solos is two too many), the instrumental wig-out that precedes I've Waited So Long is an indicator that The Stands, erm, stand a little higher than the average guitar-based indie group.
Having had a throwback to the early '80s and the mid-60s, it's left to Jet to provide us with the missing link to the '70s. But let's not over-simplify this Melbourne lot's talent. It takes real skill to meld the best bits of the bands you loved as a kid into something referential, reverential and relevant. Live, the band's AC/DC infatuation comes to the fore more than on record, which is no bad thing to these ears, and creates a party cocktail of rabble-rousing rock.
It's been said before but one thing Jet are not short of is confidence. Nic Cester is a swaggering frontman, most notably seen when he practically stops Are You Gonna Be My Girl (that's the Vodafone or iPod ad to the uninitiated, and possibly the only song that sounds like Iggy Pop's Lust For Life leading into The Who's My Generation) in order to berate the crowd for not making enough noise. His younger brother Chris knows his way around a cocky line too, but when you can drum like Keith Moon and then sing as sweetly as he does on Move On (Jet's now traditional acoustic encore), you might say he's got a point. Then again, it could be the booze talking, and goodness knows, there's enough of it on stage.
Move On is a particularly Lennon & McCartney moment (as is Look What You've Done), but Jet really fly us to the moon with Come Around Again, which is like their very own Don't Let Me Down and sees Cester Snr delivering an impressively lung-busting vocal performance.
After an hour or so of the perfect live music foil for a Friday night, Jet shoot off and leave a smiling crowd to exit the musical time capsule. Who says history lessons aren't fun?
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Mercury Prize 2009 nominees
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BUY The Killers - Hot Fuss
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