The Teenagers

Teenagers today are all pretty hot, or that’s what modern culture tells me. They’re confident, sorted, have business plans and know how to raid any pose from the past 50-odd years. Teenagers today are not even teenagers, probably. Maybe they’re in their 20s. Or 30s. Internet porn has taught me that much, at least.

In the darkness of the Amersham Arms The Teenagers don’t even break a sweat. They’ve got it sussed for what they hope is minimum input / maximum output, playing along to a click track and pre-recorded backing tapes. A random girl is invited up to mime to the female vox for ‘Homecoming’. She loves to know that they’d like to fuck her cunt. Everyone onstage does a non-committal finger-popping dance to show that they don’t care too much about anything.

The Teenagers know that at an Adventures Close to Home night, with hours of DJing following, they’re to treat their set like McFly at G-A-Y — they understand everyone’ll be drinking and talking and so keep the set short and simple and get out fresh. Save getting messy for the Vice photo shoot, where it matters. They play ‘Starlett Johansson’ with a look in their eye like they know they really will get to meet Scarlett. I can picture the photos in the gossip pages of London Lite as I watch them.

The Teenagers go down easy — everyone in the venue likes them, even though the crowd aren’t actually that enthusiastic and are forgetting there’s been a band on even as they head outside for a cigarette immediately after. The Teenagers wouldn’t scare the living shit out of anybody. How could they? They’re a passive-aggressive The Killers with better slacks and swearwords.