Teenage Drug

THE SULTANS OF PING: “Teenage Drug” (Sony)

“HOLBORN TO Holloway, Holloway To Heathrow, Heathrow To Tokyo...Michiko I love you!”

Pop fucking genius or what? I wonder whether Niall O’Flaherty realised when he was scrawling that down on the back of a fag packet that he was creating a terrace-chant classic to rival the yobbish delights of ‘Hersham Boys’ or ‘Stranglehold’.

I know I’ll go straight to the top of their hate list for saying it but The Sultans really are a slightly camped-up ’90’s version of Sham 69 and UK Subs, a surefire bet for a rollicking night out and the odd three minutes of brainless brilliance but not the sort of band that’s going to push back the frontiers of modern music with their originality.

The Sultans’ saving grace – and thankfully it’s a biggie – is that on ‘Michiko’ and half-a-dozen of the other tracks on Teenage Drug, the sources they borrow from are impeccable. So what if ‘Love & Understanding’ skin-grafts the Pistols’ ‘Liar’ onto The Buzzcocks’ ‘What Do I Get’? Does it honestly matter that ‘Teenage Punks’ with its Shonen Knife-assisted chorus is a deadringer for just about any Cramps song you’d care to mention?

The point is easy to labour – suffice to say that me and an equally sad trainspotter mate counted 16 misappropriated riffs on side one and we couldn’t wait to flip the bugger over to side two.

Whether this amounts to pastiche or plagiarism I’m not really sure but whatever the degree of thievery, it’s infinitely preferable to The Sultans attempts at, ahem, sophistication. ‘Pussycat’ would be an adequate enough rehash of ‘Love Cats’ if Robert Smith had written it when he was 12 and in the throes of his first adolescent crush. As it is, O’Flaherty’s purring sounds painfully neutered and ‘The Curse’ is similarly afflicted with a risible Vincent Price impersonation.

The irony is that no matter how dumb, crass or derivative they become, The Sultans are impossible to hate. It may be subjected to a spot of judicious programming but Teenage Drug is an album that’s going to take up residence reasonably close to my CD player for a while to come.

Especially when I’m tired, emotional and wishing it was 1976 all over again.

• Stuart Clark