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Those Dancing Days, The Wave Pictures, Click Clik

Miss Fliss 01/02/2008

There's a reason I'm wary of free gigs. It's getting one can of beer for the price of four. It's also painfully dire support bands. Who thought it would be a good idea to mix Mike Skinner sensibilities with cod-reggae-cum-rave indie? With lyrics about bling and "dickheads" that Kate Nash would kill for? Clik Clik's target audience is not a bunch of culturally interested Time Out readers, it's a youth club. Grudgingly, it is hats off to them, since they are of youth club age, but, they ought to concentrate less on the exact angle with which they doff their hip-hop trucker caps.

The Wave Pictures have a contingent of heartbroken Mozzer fans dancing down the front, punching the air, and singing along for them. These fervent fans must be too young to remember Hefner, for this is almost note-for-note, self-loathing lyric for self-loathing lyric Hefner rip-off. Tuneless, gawkily geeky singer? Check. Sparse old-school indie? Yep. A song called My Groovy Christian Girlfriend? Oh for God's sake! People are dancing and cheering and clapping, but me, I'm not sure what to do with a song that compares the sunlight to a gang of labradors.

Those Dancing Days are the hype we've come to heighten. Teenaged, Swedish, girlishly pretty, and tunesome, there are high hopes. Alas, amidst Strokes song-thievery, repetitive Wurlitzer organ pounding, voices cracking, and not much in the way of variety or substance, we are left wondering why we waited so many hours through so much badness of support acts, for what amounts to simply two great songs: Hitten and the eponymous anthem Those Dancing Days itself. And they're two great songs that are played pretty poorly. All the cute smiles and dances in the world cannot cover up lacklustre music. The set is mercifully succinct, and we go home thinking, "ah well, it was free".

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