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dead kids by hannah asprey

Round Our Gaff

Date: 16/02/2008
Price: £6/£5 flyers
Info: Plus Friendly Fires DJ set. 8pm-1am.
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by Sarah Bee

Upstairs at the Enterprise is stuffed to the gills, and four blokes are crammed onto the bijou stage, creating a delectable throb of tune-scorning noise. The keyboard player's mic stand begins to swish about as if in distress. The blond keyboard-wrangler scowls and steadies it. What tit is wiggling the stand around like that? Oh… it's the singer. Hai!

Mike Title – for it is he – takes to the stage with one tigerish bound and drags the noise kicking and screaming into the screamy, kicky 'Fear and Fluoride'. His harsh Essex babblings and batshit-mental gaze make him impossible to ignore. But just to make sure, he stomps back off the stage and commences Operation Punter-Mess, seizing the wrists of a couple of giggling sitter-downers who allow themselves to be hauled upright like reluctant wedding guests being dragged onto the dancefloor. Then he clomps up onto a table and stands there, resplendent in his knee-length Camden-grade leopard coat and shouty. Full glasses topple to the floor. Liquid goes everywhere. He then charges, almost gracefully, sidelong into the crowd. Limbs go everywhere. Someone throws a full pint in his face. He doesn't even blink. It's all looking a bit fighty, but fortunately the air of hostility dissipates, and it becomes clear that a) Dead Kids are rather good at this whole post-post-Prodigy electro-headfuck lark, and b) the energy they fill a room with makes people their bitches, split pints or no.

There's none of the cymbal-immolation of Title's former band, Sona Fariq, but the music – a deft melange of the most piquant heavy stuff you used to like, polished up until it's modern as hell – has that same sense of rabid unpredictability about it. Shades of PiL being throttled by a testosterone-crazed gorilla, and rather getting off on it. How disgusting. More please.

Photo: Hannah Asprey

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Great Review

Saw them at the Old Blue Last on Satuday 23rd, and they were just as good. Ignore them at your peril.


Yes.

They kicked mighty ass indeed at The Enterprise show.





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