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DEEP, dark in the back of any music lovers’ closet
are a number of skeletons they’ll forever try to keep
locked away for fear of losing credibility among their
music-loving peers.
Like the time they sold out and stayed in a B&B at a
festival, or the time they ‘took their little sister’
to see some garrulous pop act and just happened to come
back glowing with pride, over-priced merchandise memorabilia
in hand. I have many such stories, but the only one
that has any relevance to my review of OKGO is
the time I went to see Barenaked Ladies at Birmingham
Academy.
As always, it was a complicated affair that actually
got me into the front row of the audience with a boy
who looked exactly like Dawson out of Dawson’s Creek
and quite possibly thought this was the best way to
impress me. But to this day I can’t remember how I actually
ended up enjoying myself, when faced with five white
men trying to fuse rap, pop, rock and Pan’s People dance
routines with an altogether ‘comedy’ vibe. But I did.
Likewise, after the spectacularly cheerful, tuneful
and majestic Webb Brothers impressed me with their singular
brand of self-aggrandising Beach Boys-harmony drenched
sunny Californian pop, I found another skeleton creeping
out of the closet. OKGO work because of a lead singer
with a hormonal-rush-inducing yelp of a good voice and
audience participation: a handclap here, a slowdance
there, a comedy rap to break up the (in places) neat
indie-punk tunes, and lots of grinning at the adoring
girls in the front row.
Somewhere in their stop-start set is a great band with
some nifty lyrics and brave departures from classic
guitar-pop-punk, but at the moment, for me, they’re
cloaked by the ghosts of the Barenaked Ladies.
And white men can’t rap.
Photo by Irene Tien © 2003
Relevant Sites:
www.okgo.net/
Natasha House for Crud Magazine 2003©
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