Despite having unloaded thousands of copies of their debut album, they bounce up and down and with the energy of a week old band
Yet is this so unfair? With so many bands hearkening back to the grand old days when `our four lads shook the foundations of the world' (or if not, at least leant against a breezeblock in the Earth's basement), is their anything exciting to come out of the musical quagmire, other than the Mersey-mawkishness of drab 90s bands like Cast and The Lightning Seeds?
Yet in the Zutons they have found new heroes, for in the WHAM!-SLAM! comic book caper of their performance you can see the twinkle in every Scouser's eye, hear the roar of Anfield and smell the burnt rubber of a freshly hotwired Ford Escort.
Pounding their way through crowd pleaser after crowd pleaser, their earnest fusion of creepy psychedelia (Remember Me, Zuton Fever) and stomping Merseybeat singalongs a la Gerry and the Pacemakers (You Will you Won't, Pressure Point) sounds less laboured than that of the Coral's (a band with which comparisons are as inevitable as the hair on the bassist's wrists) and resonates past the heaving flesh and broken plastic cups and into the Nottingham night.
And yet despite having unloaded thousands of copies of `Who Killed the Zutons?' they bounce up and down and with the energy of a week old band; the gormless grin and operatic whail of Dave McCabe (who seemingly stole his clothes from a scarecrow), the demented way the drummer lists forward and shouts harmonies at the ceiling and the way someone's sister terned up on the saxamathing...
Stonking fun - no more, no less - is the objective of the Zutons sweaty shindig, and with this I don't doubt they'll unload thousands more records. Some not even out of a car boot.
This gig was part of Rizla's Inspired By Festival
www.thezutons.co.uk
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