The Indelicates - the real deal or rock 'n' roll fakes?
The Indelicates: A scabrous swipe at youth culture and pop
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Tuesday, 08, May 2007 01:20
Led by keyboard-playing ex-Pipette Julia Clark-Lowes and guitarist Simon Clayton, the Indelicates describe themselves as a despicable folk-rock cabaret with a mission to end all music.
To date their efforts amount to two small-scale releases; seven inch single We Hate The Kids and absurdly titled The Last Significant Statement To Be Made In Rock n Roll tour EP.
The single is a scabrous swipe at youth culture and pop. Its sleeve is intentionally exploitative and controversial - Simon stood, gun in hand before a prostrate Julia, same gun in mouth - and the song acts as the band's aural manifesto. The lyrics speak of the eternal confidence trick of pop music that "was ever thus", while warning that "we'll do it too", in the most true assessment of rock n roll bands since Noel Gallagher warned us off putting our lives in their hands.
Laced with enough pop allusions both musical and lyrical to show they know of what they speak, the title track of the follow-up EP covers much of the same ground, with the band taking a cynical scythe to the institutions of rock and roll; slicing up drugs, scenes and the worship of youth with a sneer. Heroin displays a sly wit with its mirth, being a tale of a girl who takes heroin, and plays "acoustic guitar and the flute/ and the harp and the Theremin/ on heroin".
The music itself is a mix of folksy acoustic guitars and unashamedly glam quiet-loud turns, with the keyboards played in a style somewhere between pop and something more brutally cold and classical, the tunes working to smooth the sharpest edges of the words into something constantly melodic before another lyrical twist hits you with a sucker punch.
An early demo from a couple of years back - the rather unsubtly Waiting For Pete Doherty To Die - is rapidly becoming redundant, but still manages a perceptive hack at the ever-present exploitation of emotion in modern rock n roll life and death, begging that "someone come and tap this pain /I haven't cried since Kurt Cobain".
The Indelicates are a million miles away from both Clark-Lowes' former carefree dance-sex-n-fluff outfit and the sordid pseudo pop idols and their pathetic followers the band so gleefully dispatch with every verse and chorus.
It's a great irony that in so concertedly unravelling and destroying the mystique around pop music, some songs can simultaneously resurrect and revel in that same aura in the way that most other music fails. Like much of Luke Haines' output since the mid-90s, The Indelicates' music does just that.
The Indelicates play the Bloody Awful Poetry night at Nambucca, London on May 19th 2007 and at Camden Bar Monsta on May 26th 2007.
Mayer Nissim