WATERCRESS (Midnight At The Olympia, Dublin)

A YOUNG scrawny foursome wandered onto the stage at the Olympia. They looked lost and nervous like a bunch of school mates about to play at a Christmas concert in front of their parents. They tripped over the cables and then the tall one dropped his guitar. The packed out crowd of 35-year-old Blockheads’ fans and blow-in English rugger-buggers chanting “We are Millwall” didn’t seem impressed. One of the lead singers (there’s two) declared “we’re jinxed” and things didn’t bode well.

Watercress opened apprehensively with ‘Sky Rocket’ which began like a Spanish lullaby, serenading ephemerally like a Mediterranean breeze. The lyrics “I know that I’ll burn but I’ll never learn” were sung by Danny Donnelly with his tongue jammed into his cheek. Like a great poet he was yearning for a lost love but grinning stupidly at the same time. After Donnelly had exchanged his mandolin for a wavin pipe attached to a toilet connection the song metamorphosed into a carnival with swirling loops of music. Bruce Cabbyje (of Czech descent) joined in on Double Bass and Los Lobos flew out the window with the kitchen sink.

Watercress gained confidence. The next song was the bluesy paranoid ‘Someone’s Watching You’. Brian Acton pulled of the vocals and the rapid rhythm changes while Donnelly did his best Ace Venture impressions. Their behaviour resembled the Monkees but their playing, especially Donnelly on the mandolin was exceptional. The die-hard Ian Dury fans were confounded by the young upstarts and their loony-bin on-stage antics. ‘Alligators’ snapped them into life. The lyrics revealed the clean-living that the band obviously advocate. “We fucked around with a lot of sound and smoked a lot of reefer/it was so real back then.” Cabbyje then did a wild thing with his low-flying bass and the bloke with the hair recession beside me started to sober up and tap his foot in wild abandon.

‘Other Things’ they informed us was strangely enough “about other things” and featured Donnelly swaggering on his mandolin while jumping around like a bunjy chord. ‘Photograph’ was a slinky snapshot which did nothing to reveal the band’s Belfast multi-ethnic musical roots but it was a damn fine song. ‘Bunburger’ was their attempt at the Beastie Boys, a socially-inflected polemic about Brian’s fetish for Cheese Burgers of course.

Incidentally this was the first time that I had ever heard of Watercress, never mind seen them. Methinks it won’t be the last. They were playing support for Ian Dury and the Blockheads who performed well off their former glories like ‘Rhythm Stick’ and the apt ‘What A Waste’. They gave their crowd what they wanted but not much beside. Dury looked like Bill Clinton with shades but Watercress looked like nothing seen ever before.

Watercress finished by scaring us with their ‘Bogeyman’ – an injection of Frank Zappa colliding with They Might Be Giants. The short set ended up with all asunder on the floor, I was feeling kind of mellow and the crowd cried out for more.

• Jason Corcoran