Pink Grease hit the stage of Liverpool’s Carling Academy to a riff lifted straight out of The Cramp’s songbook, amidst a flurry of colour, glitter, eye-liner and cheekbones, cheekbones and more cheekbones.
Right from the off you know you’re in for a night of top entertainment regardless of what the actual music is like. The band immediately connect with the (small but enthusiastic) audience and the stage is a hive of frantic activity, some spontaneous, some clearly ‘choreographed’ but all geared to grab your attention and keep you from straying bar-wards.
Singer Rory Lewarne revels in the spotlight - his influences clearly Bowie and Iggy but visually he reminds me most of Spiders era Mick Ronson – not allowing the small and crowded stage to cramp his style but stretching his territory to include cavorting amongst the audience and hanging from the lighting rig. Now, if we’re talking ‘pop stars’, I reckon these guys are just what the nation’s youth need and they surely deserve to send the dull and dour likes of Keane et al back to the tax office and local government jobs where surely they belong.
However, in order to do so they will definitely need some stronger material. On tonight’s showing it tends to be all surface and no real substance – the band make a reasonable solid noise but few of the songs make a real impact and even singles, ‘The Pink G.R.Ease’ and ‘Peaches’ fail to deliver the kind of hooks that really great singles must have, the kind that would bounce around your head on the train home. But, that doesn’t stop everyone present having fun and the shortish (35 – 40 minute) set is all too quickly over. They encore with ‘I Need Blood’ and you really can see the seeds of something potentially great.
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If they can get the material to merit the image then a great future lies ahead and they could snatch ‘a glam revival’ away from the limp disco of the Scissor Sisters – if not, well, do you remember Sigue Sigue Sputnik? You do? Yeah, but I bet you can’t remember the songs! Truck on tykes.
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