Grace / Clocks / The Cheviot Hoods

In a bit of an odd turnaround the promoters for tonight’s King Tut’s gig had decided to shuffle around the bands, sticking the first support band on last, the second support band on first, and the headliner on somewhere in the middle. Just ‘cos that all makes sense doesn’t it?

Jingly guitars built around perfectly crafted melodies have always been a bit of a Scouse talent, and summery guitar pop four piece Clocks couldn’t sound much more Liverpuddlian if they tried. Yet the band are clearly suffering from some form of identity crisis as they all allegedly hail from the summery, world famous musical haven that is err….Epsom.

Never mind though, as their breezy, uplifting choruses and wonderful harmonies hark back to memories of The La’s, Cast, The Coral, and dare I venture to mention The Beatles?

There’s a familiar 60’s stomping feel good vibe to the group, who are washed up in that style of post-Beach Boy’s psychedelia that the Britpop era tried so hard to imitate.

It’s refreshingly upbeat, and the particularly melodious ‘That Much Better’ swoons along with an instantly appealing familiarity that probably takes more than a helping hand from The Coral’s ‘Dreaming of You’.


Sadly a rather pathetic turn out at King Tut’s meant that Clocks played to a virtually open room, leaving a timid but talented group to play a rather difficult set with little in the way of crowd appreciation. Still, there’s evidently more to come from the vivacious outfit, and I wouldn’t be surprised if their next visit to Glasgow is in front of a packed crowd.

Headliner’s Grace certainly aren’t going to progress the stagnant indie genre any further, and each of their conventional songs swap between embarrassingly clichéd and pathetically emotionless. Grace borrow all their material from a tedious assortment of archetypal MOR soft rock groups that your mum would happily have in her CD collection if HMV had sold out of Simply Red albums.


Their performance was marred by the forced enthusiasm by their groupies / street team / best mates / whoever the f*ck they were – who clapped and cheered enthusiastically to every song the group played like they were some type of martyrs brought back to purge the world of unfulfilled musical promises, or something…

It’s difficult to like camera hugging front man John-Paul Jones, who struts around the stage with unabashed arrogance, staring down the lens of my camera in a rather pathetic attempt to look cool. Still, if I wanted to shoot tits I’d have taken up ornithology and joined the RSPB.

The final act in this topsy-turvy evening actually turned out to be quite brilliant, and in hindsight the decision for The Cheviot Hoods to finish off the evening was a well placed one.

There was no feigned enthusiasm present in the biggest crowd gathering of the night, and the venue had a bit of a school disco feel to it with the local youth mob dancing around the stage in a drunken stupor.

For supposed amateurs they manage to conduct themselves with the most professional performance of the evening, putting Grace to shame and outlining just how much of a divide there was between the two groups.



Simple, boisterous lyrical content goes down brilliantly on ‘Get the rounds in’. It may just be puerile two dimensional bollocks but it never hurt The Rifles, The Cribs, or for that matter Oasis.

They rounded off their performance with the self perpetuating “I Wanna be a Cheviot Hood’ and I felt quite embarrassed at being the only one present who didn’t actually know all the words.

A bit of a mixed bag tonight, and won’t be remembered as one of the better King Tut’s gigs, but both Clocks and The Cheviot Hoods showed promise and I think it will just be a matter of time before both groups begin to rise up the rankings…

FUTURE GIGS

sorry, we currently have no gigs listed for this act.