When Paul McCartney came up with Yesterday he didn’t play it to anyone for a while –he thought it was so catchy that someone else must already have written it.
At times Robbie Boyd pulls off the same trick with an arsenal of tunes that must already be daytime radio fixtures in a parallel world.
The four-piece band may have come dressed as rent-a-hipsters; collarless shirts, Shoreditch hats and braces. But they are not a cool band, and this is not cool music.
This is guilty pleasure pop rock to kick-off your shoes to at a wedding, then blast in the car while the kids sing along in the back.
They used to call these tunes your milkman could whistle, and there isn’t anything wrong with that.
The back room of a hip Northern Quarter pub is completely the wrong venue for all of this of course, you either need a big crowd or balls of steel to get a proper call-and-response chorus going, neither of which turned up tonight.
The awkward sales patter between songs including “Buy our EP!” and “Follow us on Twitter!” all fall flat.
But it’s easy to forgive the odd misfire when another well-turned bridge slips back into the chorus like a pair of old shoes, and we all hum along like we’ve known these songs for years.
Perhaps pretty soon, we will.
Image courtesy of ITV via YouTube, with thanks
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