The Pigeon Detectives

Funny how you can be hometown heroes whilst the rest of the world offers you nary a glance.

Leed’s The Pigeon Detectives must be scratching their heads hard wondering how they can sell out the 1,100-capacity Met University, having played the previous day in support of Milburn in Preston.

But tonight, the five-piece are kings. Coming onstage to the sort of light and smoke affair usually afforded to AC/DC with Roy Orbison’s ‘I Drove All Night’ blaring out, it’s like they’ve won the war for Yorkshire Independence single-handedly. And, given the crowd’s boisterous propensity for bellowing out “YOOOORRRKSHIREE” at any chance, they just might have.

There’s nothing original about the Pigeons: they marry the sound of the Strokes’ piercing guitars with the knockabout charm of a Libertines or any other ‘lad’ band of the past four years. However, the communal thrill of their songs is undeniable.

New single_ ‘I Found Out’ - released this week and set to crash the top 40 - is tossed away early in their set, setting the crowd into raptures as the refrain _"Going out with? / is she going out with?" is thrown back at the band with venom. There are four or five other songs of similar quality - tunes that stick in your brain within seconds of the final chords seeping away into the beer-soaked audience.

The standout track is the abrasively avuncular ‘I’m Not Sorry’, a gleeful retort to ex-girlfriends (as, essentially, all their songs are), released originally this year. Upon its re-release next year, expect it to become an indie dance-floor staple.

All the while brattish singer Matt Bowen causes mayhem, climbing speaker stacks, setting off fire extinguishers and demanding (and getting) full-scale crowd invasions. The result is an exhilarating spectacle.

As we poke through the last embers of whatever you may call the indie scene that has dominated popular culture for the past two years, it’s easy and fair to speculate that the door is firmly shut post-Monkeys on ‘this sort of thing’. I doubt The Pigeon Detectives care. They’re gonna kick down the door and run amuck through the wake anyway.