Club NME

The assembled fashionistas look somewhat bemused. They came expecting a drive-time friendly amalgam of emo and soft-rock, and they certainly hadn't bargained for The Sound Explosion. Sporting the kind of barnet that's more Spinal Tap than Give It A Name, their guitarist Glen Roughead begins proceedings by flying around the stage, performing Townshend style whirlwind moves and generally behaving like a man possessed.

It's shortly after 10.30, The Plug is pretty much empty yet still he's brandishing a megaphone, climbing speaker stacks and taking his guitar into the crowd, much to everybody's bemusement. These interruptions are just minor deviations from an incendiary set of jagged blues punk: lots of distortion, less in the way of finesse, but with enough self-belief to render any technical limitations irrelevant.

It doesn't matter that it's impossible to make out a single lyric from either Roughead or his co-vocalist Kit Endean, or that their solos recall an age when fret wanking was an acceptable form of entertainment. Good old fashioned rock'n'roll played with this much self belief might no longer be enough to sells bucketloads of records but it certainly makes for a thoroughly entertaining half hour.

For all the hype surrounding Londoners Boy Kill Boy they just can't match up to the Geordie four-piece's showmanship. This wouldn't be such a problem if they had an arsenal of tunes but on tonight's evidence they're lacking in this department, too. Somewhere after their second song it all starts to sound the same, and when that sound attempts to marry the dubious soft-rock of Duran Duran with more fashionable Britpop stylings and veers dangerously close to emo in the process it does nothing to enhance the appeal.

Singer Chris Peck, looking every inch the suited and booted equivalent of Caleb Followill, does his level best to make up for their shortcomings with some pronounced vocals and impassioned delivery but it largely falls on deaf ears. They're certainly easy on the eye, dressed in suits and with all the icy cool you'd expect, but when the music fails to please all of that is meaningless, at least to me. Those very same fashionistas, now caterwauling with delight in between taking pictures with their camera-phones, would appear to disagree.

Photos courtesy of Gary Wolstenholme