Friday 16/09/05 Juliette And The Licks @ Carling Academy 2, Liverpool

Like any good method actor Juliette Lewis has obviously studied the best in the craft of fronting a band before taking her Licks on the road. Tonight at the end of a two month UK tour she appears resplendent in a banana yellow cat suit throwing shapes and poses perfected by the likes of Dickinson, Daltry, Plant and Lydon over the past 35 years. But while they all had the material to back up their on stage preening sadly Miss Lewis possesses little more than a bunch of bad AC/DC rip offs to work with.

What the Licks lack is any sense of originality, trawling out creaking riffs and clichés a plenty at a hundred miles an hour. Despite being insanely loud, the novelty wears off after a couple of songs, this only serves further notice to the fact that they lack any noticeably good material. Songs such as ‘American Boy’ and latest single ‘Got Love To Kill’ do their best to pull the band in the right direction but all too often we are left feeling empty by a procession of similar sounding tracks and Gigwise finds themselves talking among friends rather than watching the stage.

The predictable encore with Lewis stage diving into the adoring thongs duly comes and goes but we are left with the pervading feeling that tonight we got a whole lot of show and not much in between. There is no doubt that Lewis exudes presence and panache, though little vocal skills, while whipping the audience up into an doting frenzy but even some of Hollywood’s greatest would have struggled with this lame duck of a script.