Back to the Future

Feeling slightly soiled after the industry self-love of the Brits, OMM felt the need for some cutting-edge musical danger. Someone who would - at the very least - give us a tingle of tinnitus with their opening note, and at best hospitalise us with the shock of their sheer brilliance. Someone like Rough Trade's hot new signings the 1990s, in other words, who we caught at murky Soho hangout Tatty Bogles on Saturday night. The attractively blunt Glaswegian trio, best described as rock'n'soul, are a noisy party band in the classic tradition. Michael McGoughran's drums approximate the stomping-rhino thunder of the Rolling Stones in full effect. It's elemental stuff, but the fire of their delivery keeps it contemporary. Their manager, sporting a fetching yellow Mackintosh, had a freshly mastered copy of their debut single, ' You Made Me Like It', burning a hole in his pocket. It's out in a couple of months, and we await its release with some anticipation. On the same evening, we winged it up to Camden Town to see fellow Rough Trader Adam Green at the Strokes' aftershow at Koko (where Bobby Gillespie was spotted, wearing a black leather trenchcoat). The highlight - judging by the screams from the audience - was the appearance of ex-Libertine Carl Barat, who brandished an acoustic guitar and a self-conscious pout for 'What a Waster' and 'Who's Got the Crack?'. Still, the 24-year-old Green is a delicious crooner in his own right, not least because he has a disturbing fondness for lurching from stirring romanticism to brattish obscenity in a single breath. (Or vice versa on 'No Legs': 'There's no wrong way to fuck a girl with no legs/ Just tell her you love her as she's crawling away'.) Which prompts the question, who's your favourite provocative lyricist?