The Kooks and Dash & Will @The Metro Theatre, Sydney(27/08/08)

Tue 2nd Sep, 2008 in Gig Reviews

The night began with the itsy-bitsy Dash and Will, whose guitars are twice the size of their bodies. It’s kind of like Veronicas-meets-Operator Please-meets-Ladyhawke; one girl sings kind of well and the other plays a mean riff. Except they’re both singing and both playing guitars, sometimes not in sync or in tune with one another. You’ve got to give them some credit – the songs are cute and their band (naturally made up of effortlessly pretty boys) does a good job of bringing a ballsy rock backing to the pint-sized lasses. But unlike the audience, many of whom are about 16 themselves, I no longer find this kind of thing cute if it’s not done well.

Enter The Kooks to rapturous applause and the crowd going absolutely berserk; as they usually do whenever British dudes make the pilgrimage to Sydney. The Kooks have a lot going for them. They’ve got a unique band dynamic supported by a deft drummer (who looks tonight something like a cross between Kaiser Chiefs’ Ricky Wilson and Hitler) and some very pretty guitar work that just screams “skill!” It’s a shame then, that the band must have not had a good flight, because they’re in a pretty ratty mood. With the lead guitarist continually forgetting his solos and shambling about, it seems they’re probably very pissed as well.

Enhancing this diagnosis is the fact that frontman Luke Pritchard is completely unintelligible in-between songs. Either his accent is so thick that it is simply indecipherable or he’s blind drunk and attempting to communicate in the way a booze hound only can – slurring. When he sings hits from their debut album, you can totally get what he’s talking about (or maybe we’re just singing so loud that we mask his Pidgin English) and you feel like you’re seeing a rock band. As a fan of early day Kooks, the new stuff goes right over my head, especially the ridiculous vanity project Do You Wanna, with its lovely line, “I know you wanna make love to me.”

Unfortunately, just being British doesn’t qualify you to give a half-arsed performance.