Thursday 16/03/06 Shitdisco @ The Barfly, Liverpool

 

OK, so it’s not Radiohead. It’s not even Oasis – it’s even simpler than that. It sounds so straightforward, you wonder why everyone isn’t doing it. The reason why they aren’t, however, is that it’s easy to hide behind fancy chords and layers of sound; only the brave are willing to plug in and play like the only thing that matters in the world is the groove. For brave, read Glasgow’s Shitdisco.

 

Shitdisco don’t bother with posing or arty sloganeering (though the art-rock crowd will lap them right up); instead they appear on stage anonymously, armed only with two basses, guitars, synths and drums and about three chords over which to shout.  Joel Stone and Joe Reeves swap vocal duties while drummer Darren Cullen thrashes punked-up disco beats non-stop throughout. Single tracks ‘I Know Kung Fu’ and ‘Disco Blood’ get loved-up reactions from the ever-increasing throng of converts, the latter seemingly an awesome piss-take on LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Daft Punk Is Playing In My House’ (‘Bobby Orlando is coming round for tea’ being the choice line and probably the tagline of the Shitdisco manifesto), but latest single ‘Reactor Party’ is the decisive nail in the coffin of any doubt – a whirl of synth-driven rock ’n’ roll that’s as much The Prodigy as it is The Clash.

 

‘We’re normally a lot more shambolic than this’, Joe laughs, as Joel spins round one too many times and ends up amongst the speakers during ‘Disco Blood’. So, at last, we know what a ‘Shambles is meant to sound like. The festivals of 2006 are there for the taking.