Alexis Petridis on what Wonky Pop might just be the thing for you
The Cardiff Barfly english hawthorn ooze many things - including a regrettable and all-pervading perfume that throne be traced back to the gentlemen's lavatories - but a sense of glamor is not among them. Exterior, photocopied posters promote forthcoming musical theater attractions. The gig-goers of Glamorgan ar invited to love an visual aspect by the unpromisingly named Annotations of an Post-mortem examination, an evening of extreme metal featuring non just Hate Eternal, but Cephalic Slaughter as well, and the 2008 term of enlistment by veteran soldier punks the UK Subs, complete with lead isaac M. Singer Charlie Harper, nowadays 64 and still dutifully belting out Stranglehold and CID for anyone street fighter enough to brave the olfactory perception of the gents.
Indoors, the members of Alphabeat sit huddled in what may be Britain's least salubrious dressing room. Hands down located so that the band deliver to entrust via the Barfly's front door and walk drink down the street to contact the stage, it offers an intriguing agate line both in refreshments for the band - honcho among them a tub of hoummos that would grounds lesser mortals to call wellness and safe and invalidate tonight's establish on the spot - and graffiti. A wit with a perm marker has covered the wall in band name calling doctored to reflect a scatological bent. "The White Shites," reads singer Anders SG. "U Poo. Gimp Large Shite."His bandmates chuckle, merely there's something profoundly incongruous some determination Alphabeat in these surroundings. For one thing, they have a atomic number 78 record album, albeit back dwelling house in Denmark. For another, e'er since they formed at school in the small town of Silkeborg, the 6 feature unabashedly dealt in feelgood chart-friendly pop. As if to restate the fact, their forthcoming album, This Is Alphabeat, features a gleeful assault on the eponymous 1978 debut ace by Trick Lydon's Public Ikon Limited. The archetype is the form of record that serious rock fans talk over in hushed and reverential tones. Alphabeat's version replaces Keith Levine's scything post-punk guitar riff with jaunty whistling."I think we did it because we know that we ar very bulge out ," says guitarist Anders B. "So we intellection it was quite a good story direction to turn the sung dynasty around because it was obviously a song that came just now later on hoodlum" - he pronounces it "poonk" - "and we view in a room, in this big indie scene that's been here for quite a long time now, we were outsiders with this pop music." He frowns. "We don't want to go as far as locution we feel as poonk as Rebel Rotten," he adds, in haste. "I don't cognise what those guys would think of that."There's an argument that suggests one of the main reasons you power consider dealing in feelgood chart-friendly drink down is to avoid having to sit in the dressing room of a grimy rock venue like the Cardiff Barfly. Later altogether, pop is supposed to be the genre that fast-tracks its stars into a glittering domain of TV appearances, expensive videos and product sanction. Pop stars don't pay their dues on what's known as the stool lap. If they perform live at wholly, they tend to do so in the form of venues where Annotations of an Necropsy and the UK Subs are unlikely to ever so tread: arenas packed with shrieking, glowstick-waving kids. Notwithstanding, Alphabeat seem strangely at household here, amid the graffito and the lethal-looking dips and the posters for the forthcoming show by Canadian hardcore poonks the Malignant neoplastic disease Bats.That english hawthorn be because they've been here before. Last yr, with their sights set on wider success, they relocated from Danish capital to British capital, and began doggedly touring the lower reaches of Britain's live tour. "We've played shitty venues for deuce or threesome old age now," says Anders B. "I think it works. It emphatically takes about of the pop-star thing out of it, only we're quite happy about that actually. We played approximately concerts in Danmark on a huge stage, where we just didn't experience like we had that much to offer. We matt-up like we were prevarication to people. Now, we're just enjoying the small venues."In any case, small venues ar very often the head of their current tour. Dubbed the Wonky Pop up Spell, it's been heralded in just about quarters as a coming-out company for a freshly sort of pop star, here to save the genre from being eventually, fatally smothered by Simon Cowell's army of analgesic talent-show winners, and to rescue the charts from the preponderance of "landfill indie" bands that presently provide the kernel and potatoes of the daylight Radio 1 playlist.The Wonky Crop up artists ar unmanufactured but barefacedly melodic and capable of playing live without resort to heaps of dry ice, troupes of dancers and an entr'acte during which they fly around the stage on wires. As well as Alphabeat, it features the mistily psychedelic pop-soul of Leon Jean-Marie, a dreadlock-sporting refugee from a Damage-style boyband wHO erst toured with Steps, and Vincent Wienerwurst, a wiry 23-year-old wHO plies an intense steel of self-produced electro-pop under the refer Frankmusic.Whole trio hark back to an 80s they're likewise young to remember, non just because of particular references in their music - Alphabeat's sound is non unlike a Dayglo take on Let's Dance-era Jim Bowie, Leon Jean-Marie is audibly in erotic love with Prince, Frankmusic vaguely resembles Soft Cellphone had they been produced by Daft Tinder - but because they seem to embody the form of pop star that held sway in the eRA earlier Stock, Aitken and Waterman's horde of interchangeable poppets took over the charts."In the early 80s, the approximation of a pop star was person world Health Organization was unusual or eccentric or fantastic in approximately way," says Peter Edward G. Robinson, of web site popjustice.com, one of the tour's sponsors. "Everything that's happened in the past tense 10 days, especially with TV shows where people are voted out if they're a number weird, suggests the best way to become a kill star is to preserve your fountainhead land and not make noticed, non have much of a sense of individuality or stylus."He baulks at the trace that hawking around venues like the Cardiff Barfly is somehow at betting odds with the feeling of existence a pop act. "This sort of grassroots access to pop isn't something which tin apply to altogether types of pop - the new Britney, or the freshly Girls Aloud, would motivation to appear with a make love - merely the idea that protrude medicine requires an impenetrable fourth wall in holy Order to be pop isn't really helpful. Pop personas are around projecting the mind that you're a star whether you're headlining at the O2 or third on the measure at a shithole like the Leeds Cockpit."However, Alphabeat's managing director Ian Watt claims the thought for the enlistment was conceived amid considerable trepidation: "It could own fallen flatbed on it's arsehole. Hand on my pump, I really couldn't have told you what form of people were going away to be in the hearing."By the time it reaches Cardiff, however, the mode around the Wonky Pop Go is bullish: the venues ingest been packed, totally three artists seem to be on the up. Alphabeat's second Brits single, Fascination, recently spent tetrad weeks in the Summit 10. Leon Jean-Marie is, as he puts it, "getting a lot of love from Wireless 2" for his debut Bed of Nails. If his forthcoming album fails, it sure as shooting won't be for want of blue-chip stock collaborators, wHO include St. Mark Ronson, Cathy Dennis and Swedish product couplet Bloodshy and Avant.And then there is Vincent Frank, world Health Organization, in a pub about the corner from the Barfly, lays come out of the closet a detailed contrive for earth domination that involves simultaneously signing a john Roy Major label take and starting his own record label, collaborating with Madonna's formerly producer Stuart Price, "a rattling stinking, all epic poem and mental live show", and ends somewhere in Hollywood with him pursuing a life history in playacting and scoring films. Keen to percentage point out that the number one ternion have altogether been ticked forth, going away only Hollywood on his to-do list, Dog is enormously engaging, hilariously good story and faintly terrifying. It's hard non to finger that if he doesn't become a bolt down hotshot, it'll be pop music's release.Meantime, Watt, world Health Organization likewise manages Mika, has presciently copyrighted the appoint Wonky Kill and is preparation to extend the blade in a fashion that would win the approval of Simon Melville W. Fuller: he's preparing deuce further tours, a golf club night and a series of one-off dates in London. Whether this makes the unit ise seem a little less organic fertiliser, unmanufactured and indeed wonky than it's possibly devising itself out to be is a moot point, but in that respect are no deficit of artists world Health Organization want to catch involved. "On that point are at least 20 bands that fit loosely into this musical genre," says Watt. "I'm hoping it will be a self-fulfilling thing, that people world Health Organization go to the gigs will want to go out and create their possess reading of it.""I believe there's definitely something occurrence," says Edward G. Robinson, world Health Organization 18 months ago appeared in the Guardian's pages suggesting john Roy Major labels should "pose their money in a battleground and set flack to it" rather than pass it trying to plunge a newly pop act. Recent events, however, have caused him to change his judgment: "People aren't just purchasing pop medicine, they're buying music from artists world Health Organization aren't inevitably English-speaking or from the UK: Robyn, Alphabeat, Sept. There was always this perception that Eurovision was roughly variety of definition of what European pop music was like, and people were able to order it in a box and dismiss it. I think the fact that it's existence playlisted at Radiocommunication 1 has made a remainder. I'm optimistic around what's coming up for the number 1 sentence in ages. There's loads of stuff knock around which is actually exciting."Quite what has caused the putative shift is a matter of more or less fence. One theory suggests that Alphabeat et al plainly have a wider reach than their manufactured forebears: "It's pop up music organism made by adults for their possess match grouping, whole at odds with the epoch when pop music was made for and marketed at children," says Robinson. Another is that the teenagers wHO bought tickets to the Wonky Pop term of enlistment were in one case seven-year-olds whose musical flashpoint was provided by Busted and Avril Lavigne. They moved on to indie and emo, but take tired of the flood of Identikit indie-rock bands and receive come back to what they know: pop artists world Health Organization publish their have songs and play their own instruments.Another suggests that indie music has now suit so mainstream and so craven in its sideline of achiever that hearing to pop represents a way of background yourself aside from the herd: "Pop got to the point where the music wasn't the to the highest degree important thing about it, where the songs were no good," says Robert Robinson. "I call back what's occurrence now, with Exploratory survey for Girls, the whole flipchart indie thing, is passing to do the same for guitar music. Pop music has suit a bit of an choice."Whatever the reason, in the Cardiff Barfly at least, it appears to be workings. The crowd - late teens and early 20s, dressed up, with a definite female skew - look happy to support Frankmusic's ongoing project for worldly concern domination. "Pop medicine was seen as a begrime thing," he reflects later, "just erotica is seen as a colly thing, and that doesn't stop the great unwashed from liking it." Leon Jean-Marie exits the leg to be surrounded by a crowd of bore girls: if he isn't quite being mobbed, it's not far off. Alphabeat are a exult: the audience reaction to Fascination almost drowns out the band. By the time wholly three artists descend on stage for an encore of Daft Punk's Digital Love, a happy and infectious topsy-turvydom reigns. No one seems bothered by the smell of the gents at entirely.· The Wonky Pop Circuit is at the Forum, Tunbridge Herbert George Wells, tonight, then Night & Day, Manchester, tomorrow. This Is Alphabeat is released on Personal appeal on June 2. Leon Denim Marie's album Bent-grass Out of Build is released on Linguistic universal on June 30
