Venus In Furs

For those of you not familiar with the Water Rats Theatre it is one of the few venues that actually encourages eardrum-exploding volumes. Appropriately enough singer/guitarist Becky Stefani’s visually loud but lovely and glittery guitar means that we should probably all be wearing sunglasses.

The Furs kick off in a blaze of guitars and grins in their quest wrench Pop Music (© Pete Waterman, Simon Fuller & young upstart svengali Ronan Keating) away from the jaws of No-Credville and stick two fingers up to the whiny indie bores. Their weapons? Riffs that will worm their way into your mind until the victim discovers that they’ve been doing the Ba-Da-Ba version for three days afterwards. Subversive lyrics: sad words in happy songs, very anti-cellophane Pop and once again, enough glitter to make strobe lighting redundant.

Without a shadow of a doubt they are on the sliproad to being rockstars. This is proven tonight as somebody in the audience chucks loads of flowers at them and drummer Ashley James looks like a man possessed by the Keith Moon demon (you get the feeling you could take the drums away and he just wouldn’t stop). However bassist Johnny Monroe could make more of the rock shapes he threw and dancing around.

Despite the “Technical Hitch” (somefink wrong with Shannon’s keyboard) and the fact that the vocals could have been a bit higher, they sounded as though they were drowning in music at times, the audience were nodding their heads and tapping their toes instead of propping up the bar. Which is always a good sign.