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Live Reviews

Some Girls – Live

Vains Of Jenna
The Underworld, London
19.04.06

Don’t you just love it when everything get’s kind of fucked up and the things you were expecting of an evening don’t turn out the way you were expecting them at all? Some Girls feature members from a huge list of respected and far cooler than you hardcore bands (some of which include The Locust, Swing Kids, Give Up The Ghost and many more) and the last type of band you would expect to see support them would be a bedraggled bunch of Swedish Guns N’ Roses obsessives hell-bent on recreating Axl and Slash’s finest moves. But that’s what we get tonight in living rock n’roll clichés the Vains Of Jenna. Apparently Some Girls met the band on the ferry over to the UK and quickly befriended them. The largely tussle-haired bleach-blonde members of the band had just thrown everything they had into a van and were intent on heading to the UK to find their fame and fortune. They had nowhere to stay, no gigs booked and knew virtually no one in London. They were just going to do it.

Some Girls fell in love with this almost fairy tale like story and couldn’t believe it when, halfway through their tour, they ran into the band in Camden and found them still living out of their van having not showered for days and poor but still utterly determined, kept going by their self-belief. Some Girls offered them a slot on tonight’s gig and here they are. And fuck me gently with a chainsaw, they’re unbelievably ace, spinning through a short but ludicrously high-energy set that combines all of the best elements of trashy rock n’roll like Aerosmith, Hanoi Rocks and of course, Guns N’Roses played with complete conviction and not a hint of irony. Soon to be legends, mark my words!

And then it just gets stranger. Anyone whose been to a lot of gigs will at some point have been hit by some kind of projectile missile thrown by a member of the audience at one point. I got hit by an entire bottle of piss at the Reading Festival once, and myself and Zac once spent an entire Marilyn Manson set at the same festival trying to hit him with buttered rolls but I have never, not ever, been walloped around the back of the head with a banana whilst watching a band. Ten minutes into Some Girls set., having successfully fired off a succession of jarring white-noise hardcore violence, some lunatic who has smuggled a horde of fresh bananas into the gig starts a full-scale fruit war and the whole place explodes as yellow fruit boomerangs spin through the air and explode on contact as the band let loose barbs of razor-tight spazz-core precision like ‘Hot Piss’ and ‘Dead In A Web’ never missing a note or a beat as they dodge the bananas. Could someone please explain what the hell is going on?

James Sherry