The hype surrounding Pink Grease was immense, which is a shame because it makes one overly critical of the hotly tipped next big thing. Will they live up to the hype or turn out to be just another Menswe@r.... Who, you ask? Exactly!
Support band Kangarucci are two blokes spieling over the top of beats, a couple of Har Mar- style thirty-somethings with a tendency towards shouting the old MF. Aside from their profanities their lyrics are fast and flowing. However, with lines like ‘I can’t play football, ‘cos I’ve got a chest infection’, it’s difficult to take these guys seriously. Whilst they clearly want to be the new Beastie Boys, they are more akin to those two old guys who did the Macarena in the late 90s.
With a bleach- blonde Andy Warhol look-a-like for a singer and a guitarist/ saxophonist who really should be in the Scissor Sisters, Pink Grease are not lacking in the camp department. Add to this a bassist with a heavily bandaged instrument (don’t!), some drums and a skinny Afro-sporting white-boy and you have Sheffield’s most glammed-up export since stainless steel.
So the band has the image and they certainly have the energy, but musically, Pink Grease really doesn’t offer anything that new. The Stooges are clearly a stimulus for the band; their sonic undertones are evident in most of the night’s set. One of their numbers ‘Fever’ reconstructs Stephen Jones and the Sex Pistols’ ‘Black Leather’, taking the song’s pulsing bass line and amalgamating it with a disco beat. Singer Rory performs like an epileptic Avid Merrion, crooning “Aw Chamone, Chamone” to the Po Na Na faithful, as he jilts around the room to multiple seizures.
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The band certainly has energy by the bucket load, as the singer and bassist cavort within the crowd, the latter high-fiving a girl (one of ‘Greasettes’), clearly enjoying the flamboyances of the Steel City sextet. New single, ‘The Pink G.R.EASE’, is perhaps too much of a pastiche for my liking; falsetto backing vocals accompany Rory’s cries that “Pink Grease are gonna make you sweat”, spoiling what is otherwise quite a catchy tune.
Elsewhere, ‘Remember Forever’ suggests hints of the 80s Matchbox and the Hives, a blend of Rocky Horror Show laughter amid a chorus resembling Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, but on amyl nitrate. ‘Peaches’ is a Roxy Music style ballad, given an added dimension by some wailing sax and the sixth Greaser, who stands twiddling away with what I can only describe as a big box covered in knobs, producing a kind of synthesized submerged sound.
As a live act, Pink Grease offer a flamboyant and extravagant set; clearly a band full of extroverts. Put their music to record and it might be a different story. Maybe they’re not another Menswe@r, but we could be witnessing the rise of the next Gay Dad. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Gay Dad...?
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