Starfighter X

Descending the narrow staircase into the Hope and Anchor's tiny basement venue, I find opening act The Ten O' Clock Scholars already in full swing. Despite a (virtually) empty room their seated front man pounds his twin keyboards like a wiry Paul Weller fronting The Ben Folds Four (sic). Sound uninspiring? The few people down there drift off and even the sound man nips out for a pint. Their bland tunes and delivery leave me wondering why the hell the promoter has wasted my time with this insipid mush. However, a daft keyboard finale sees an end to it and the audience magically appear…

"Are you the Gimps?" I ask, at the risk of sounding rather rude, of one the five fat leather-jacketed men before me._ "…Yeah,"_ says a stocky chap with a Rickenbacker bass. The Gimps are, according to Starfighter-X frontman David Graham, 'the garagest of garage bands'. Indeed it’s not hard to imagine the searing racket booming out of a Detroit carport. Searing fuzztone guitars pump out a chugging hypnotic drone that could have come from QOTSA’s 60’s dads. The Gimps’ poppier stuff manifests itself as crude, primitive psychedelia, the darker, heavier relative of Syd Barrett, or the 13th Floor Elevators – or some other obscure psych rock band I’ve never heard, but think it’s cool to namedrop anyway. The singer dances round like Bez, deploying the shouting in a bucket vocal style developed by his pal Shaun Ryder. Quaintly, their G-I-M-P-S T-shirts are out of order, making them the Pims, or the Pigs or summat.

Starfighter-X, London’s premier purveyors of breakbeat-punk madness, are on fine form tonight; Dave hunched over the mic one second, leaping from the stage, guitar behind his head, the next. If tousle-haired David and Anastasia, pounding away like a 21st century Mo Tucker, are the stars of the show, then cheeky chappie bassist Justin is SFX’s secret weapon, lacing one song with an angular repetitive figure fit to grace a Fall tune, the next with a pop hook to make Andy Rourke proud. Like Glen Matlock or Alex James before him, he’s the guy who plays the tunes while everyone’s having fun making a racket! Of course, SFX are a fantastic pop band, for all their talk of futurism and of being an art experiment. From the stuttering funk of ‘Illegal Racing’ to the Smithsian melancholy of ‘Too Much, too soon, too late’, there’s a songwriting prowess to raise them above the morass of difficult-for-difficult’s-sake avant-noise rubbish of so many art-school indie bands. With major label interest, who knows, the world may get to hear Starfighter-X yet. But you shouldn’t wait for the squares to catch up. You should see them now.