Call me a sucker for romance, but you can't beat the underdog coming good can you? I mean, let's be honest: when W&H first encountered THE PADDINGTONS supporting The Others at a spectacular show at London's Cargo approximately 12 months back they conformed to their likely stereotype of also-rans in the East End urchin stakes and failed dismally to fool us with the kind of knackered punk retreads that should have been left in the Rhythm Factory's toilets. We'll soon see the end of this lot, we thought.
Yet, after a quite remarkable year of seemingly relentless touring, hit singles (cough) and an improbable Hedi Slimane-sponsored collection in Paris, the token Northern band least likely to have actually gone some way to proving that they're really not (no, come back) simply the bunch of Doherty-worshipping misfits we'd previously dismissed with something approaching glee.
Yes, I'm sure you're still struggling to comprehend this, but with debut album "First Comes First", Hull's (gulp) finest go some considerable way to staking a claim for themselves as a decent punk-pop outfit who can find their way around a good tune with something approaching aplomb, even if they still stop well short of charisma.
If we're still being cynical (we-ell), we could of course argue that producer Owen Morris may have had a hand in this remarkable transformation. His methods are notoriously unorthodox (as you'd probably expect from anyone responsible for the birth of magic by groups such as Oasis, The Verve and Ash) and in recent interviews The Pads have gushed proudly about Morris force-feeding them with red wine and copious amounts of beer while they were recording. Strangely enough, your reviewer fails to believe that was such a bad experience for anyone concerned, but whatever the truth really is, it's undeniable that producer and charges were good for each other, for significant parts of "First Comes First" actually rock pretty convincingly.
Admittedly, the majority of the highlights come within the album's first half, but there's no denying the rampant thrills to be had in songs like "Some Old Girl", "50 To A £" and the knowing "Worse For Wear". "Some Old Girl" is first off the blocks and simply seethes with energy. The Dobbs brothers' are a powerhouse of a rhythm section, Marv Hines and Josh Hubbard's guitars make like greyhounds pouncing on a field of fluffy bunnies and even Tom Atkins' ragged whine sounds within croaking distance of heroic. Bloody hell.
"50 To A £" and the rough'n'caustic "Panic Attack", meanwhile, remind you that - against the odds - The Paddingtons have actually quietly begun to churn out a string of great, Buzzcocks-y singles and their reappearance here only confirms their quality, even if the intro to the latter still sounds like a Half Man Half Biscuit out-take. "Worse For Wear", meanwhile, is arguably every bit as good. A hard-won, Sunday morning coming down song, it finds Atkins wailing "Do you know which way to go when you're on your own?" and is only too affecting in its' refusal to pull any punches.
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The highlights refuse to totally peter out at this stage either, though things are rather less consistent from hereon in. Nonetheless, both the autobiographical "Tommy's Disease" and the sneery "Stop Breathing" - where Atkins unleashes his best Jake Burns-moves-to-East-Yorkshire howl - rock with efficiently scraggly abandon and the closing "Sorry" winds itself into an intuitively livewire buzzpunker even though it begins and ends with the sort of lo-fi widdling Mark.E. Smith would have rejected in 1979.
And, even though The Paddingtons pull a heartening number of rabbits from their scuzzy top hats, it's also true that there are times when they still sound uninspired going on duff. "21", for example, is simply a brawl looking for somewhere to happen, although it's preferable to the anthem-by-numbers cluelessness of "Loser", which has all the finesse of a rejected UK Subs B-side. Mind you, in mitigating cicumstances it WAS written by drummer Grant Dobbs. The real 'dearie me' moment, though, is surely reserved for "Alright In The Morning" which fulfills the apparently obligatory urchin scene's ska-Clash homage in a truly cringeworthy fashion.
So there's little point looking to The Paddingtons if you want big issues and voices of a generation. Lyrically, they touch on the likes of prostitution ("Some Old Girl"), gun culture ("First Comes First") and the effects of bad drugs and suicide ("Panic Attack"), but that's about as far as it goes outside of the inevitable relationship situations, and if you're after a band who tell you everything you want to know about your life then you're barking up the wrong tree.
However, even with these limitations taken into account, "First Comes First" is by and large a thrilling and infectious debut album which sensibly bows out after a just-about-right 33 minutes. Yes, it's more of a provocative cod and chips rather than the sort of haute cuisine we might look for elsewhere, but it goes down a treat and will produce an appreciative belch afterwards. Reet champion.
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