Apart from fading supermodels and entrepreneurs keen for co-investors to help develop their hotel portfolio – at a time when the average Friday night reveller is more debauched than Keith Moon and technology allows anyone with the inclination and talent to rustle up mini-symphonies in their bedrooms – who really needs rock stars anymore?
Once upon a time, members of rock bands were viewed as skipping libertines, dabbing colour on grey, post-war lives – inciting envy and vicarious delight. Now, however, with the original gene-pool so hopelessly diluted, more-often-than-not they provoke our sympathy and concern. Or at least they should do.
Anyone who caught the recent television show Stalking Pete Doherty or its cinematic blood-brother Dig will no doubt be nodding now in agreement.
Both shone a disturbing light into the dark recess of the supposedly warm and cuddly world of indie rock, and turned up a common pathological state shared amongst the scene’s various protagonists (performers, promoters and yes, punters too) – one of carcinogenic narcissism, recurrent depression and self-medicated mental instability.
Hey kids, Rock and Roll.
Viewing these made you wonder why new bands bother. Why don’t they get jobs that will make them happier and more healthy? Like down a pit or somewhere.
However, The Subways – a three piece from Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire – are entirely unconcerned with all this. Untainted by cynicism, they march towards their fate with all the happy bonhomie of first week recruits during World War One.
Young For Eternity – as the title suggests – is, like Ash’s 1977, a self-conscious attempt to harness the band’s youthful brio in one loud, Ferris-wheel fizz. And, more often than not, Josh Cooper, his sister Charlotte and her boyfriend Billy Lunn manage to rustle up a noise that, while hardly jaw-droppingly original, has enough endearing quirks and good-natured charm to warrant your attention.
True, on far too many occasions (‘Holiday’, ‘Rock And Roll Queen’) the band default into the kind of brainless, chord-thundering, grunge-lite slogs that even Sterophonics fans would dismiss as doggerel. But honourable exceptions to this iffy rock-out policy can be found in ‘Oh Yeah’ and ‘I Want To Hear What You Have Got To Say’ – tunes where the call-and-response antics of Billy and Charlotte indicate the existence of unguarded, flesh-and-blood personalities. Which – in the era of the vampiricly ambitious Razorlight and The Kaiser Chiefs – is a reason to champion them in itself.
The Subways are at their most interesting, though, when they quit trying to reach out to the back of the hall and instead retreat into a huddle. The results, such as the blissful ‘No Goodbyes’ and ‘She Sun’ have all the graceful weightlessness of Shack and The La’s.
They’re a close knit bunch, this lot, and it is during the songs where it almost seems like they’re singing to themselves that The Subways blossom into an act worth watching.
Of course, once they leap over the top, they may get banged up and mangled or never come back. But let’s try to enjoy it while we can – before The Subways launch their first offensive.