NME Awards Tour

NME Awards Tour at Portsmouth Guildhall, Wed 15 Feb

Review by Colin Roberts

As the brand-endorsed indie circus rolls into another faceless UK city, stock is taken of what this year's offerings can provide. Frills? Pills? Or just a night of cheap thrills?»

Guildhall

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Mystery Jets

• Blaine Harrison - vocals, percussion, keys
• Will Rees - guitar, keys, backing vocals
• Henry Harrison - guitar, keys, mellotron, backing vocals
• Kai Fish - bass, backing vocals
• Kapil Trivedi - drums

We Are Scientists

When people talk about WAS - and talk they do, heatedly - certain words can be trusted to surface. Listed, they read like a Who's Who of action verbs: barrel roll, back flip, bikini wax, and others, all beginning with the letter b.

Ask yourself this: ask yourself what you personally would want in a rock band. Would you want a guitar that alternately screams a throaty scream and recites heartbreaking verse? A bass like a bottomless pool of Coke Slurpee - deep, dark, invigorating? Fevered drums crackling like a bowl of Rice Krispies with a megaphone, contagious as even the sexiest of the African airborne viruses? Would you even bother asking for three part harmonies this tight?

Assembled, Voltron-like, in the 2000 Berkeley Spring, WAS soon migrated South on the belief that Hollywood, and her daughters, needed them. Though their logic was sound - Lara Flynn Boyle foundering in the arms of a septuagenarian; Ms. Zeta-Jones trading prenuptual caveats with a man twice her age and at least half-again as sketchy - none of the scientists, not one, managed to secure the disposable vows of a starlet. Severely disillusioned by reality's failure to jibe with statistical certainty (or, for that matter, with a poetic unravelling of fate), WAS pulled up their tent stakes, rented out their mansion, and boarded an East-bound military transport, leaving behind the eager foundations of an empire and many thousands of fans seizing as one.

They touched down with admirable aplomb on the top right coast, and by combining Pinochet's indomitable passion for winning, Margaret Thatcher's bullheaded work ethic, and the Gipper's flair for a nice soft shoe, we are scientists were able to survive the heat of their first New York summer, if narrowly. That fall, as the temperature abdicated its hold on a city's will, WAS rushed to fill the power vacuum. A year and half downstream, rock's none-too-thorny crown is still up for grabs. But odds-makers are calm as a cookie, a stale, lifeless cookie. One look at the website, one listen to the albums, one appraisal of the firmness of each band member's ass... that's all it usually takes. Those in the know have read the writing on the wall, and boy do they like what they see: WAS sell CD/t-shirt combo-deal to every French-man, -woman, and -child; WAS design cheap jeans that fit like designer jeans, sell for designer prices; WAS win presidency in landslide, American people demand recount . . .

we are scientists is a band with one almost strangely simple objective: to play music so raucus and catchy, to do it with such canine intensity and Sinatran panache, that listeners by the millions will be not just enlivened but enlightened, not merely vandalized but broken into and looted, so that, with borderless gratitude and amity, some large, meta-representational world organization, such as NATO or FIFA, suspends from the band's three skinny necks by tricolored ribbon medallions, medallions made of gold or at least convincingly gilded, in a well attended ceremony in a banquet hall built just for this occasion on, like, Earth's moon.»

Maximo Park

Northeastern indie-rockers with a dash of artiness, poetry and synth in their wired, poppy sound.

Paul Smith (vocals)
Duncan Lloyd (guitar)
Archis Tiku (bass guitar)
Lukas Wooller (keyboards)
Tom English (drums)

Arctic Monkeys

Alex Turner: guitar/vocals
Jamie Cook: guitar
Andy Nicholson: bass (left 2006)
Matt Helders: drums
Nick O'Malley: bass

Formed back in 2002 and hailing from the High Green area of Sheffield, Arctic Monkeys were the success story of 2006. Their first two singles, 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor' and 'When The Sun Goes Down' reached number one, and their debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not also climbed to the top of the albums chart in its first week. It's the fastest-selling debut album in British history (as of February 2007). NME has named it the fifth-greatest UK album of all time.

The name? Says Helders: "Jamie just always wanted to be in a band called Arctic Monkeys. Which is a cool name." (Prefix Magazine).

The fame? They don't like it, still. Before they were signed, the band banned talent scouts from their shows. Like peers Bloc Party, Arctic Monkeys have never seemed wholly at home in front of camera lenses and when a journalist comes a-snooping.

The band's MySpace site - "[When we went number one in England] we were on the news and radio about how MySpace has helped us. But that's just the perfect example of someone who doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. We actually had no idea what it was" (Prefix Magazine)- is here. Tellingly (?), its headline reads 'Don't believe the hype'.