Every year, sections of the music biz have a competition to find the "new Happy Mondays". Previous incumbents include Flowered Up (1990, the "London Happy Mondays"), Northern Uproar (1995, the "younger, snottier Happy Mondays") and Lo-Fidelity Allstars (1998, the "not very happy new Happy Mondays"). These bands have another thing in common: they were never heard of again.
Campag Velocet are the latest "new Happy Mondays", but they have more chance than most. A rain forest has been decimated to provide their press coverage, but more importantly they don't really sound like Happy Mondays at all.
Indeed, more often they recall Madchester's even more hallowed sons, The Stone Roses. But that's the Roses before they discovered dance, when they were still hauling riffs round windy Manchester warehouses, and before they were any good.
The press hype around Campag - aping the "outrage" around the early Mondays and the Sex Pistols - has told us how mainstream radio are "running scared" of them. This probably explains why their Bon Chic Bon Genre album has met with wildly differing reviews, and appears on an unfashionable label. However, the plain truth is that they have less idea of a tune than the man who stands outside Chalk Farm tube with his penny whistle. Actually, this is unfair. He does a more passable impression of Simon & Garfunkel than Campag's unlistenable impression of a radical pop group. Apart from tuneless, sub-Roses, sub-Pistols sneering, there's impenetrable Verve-like prog jams and the odd (very odd) whiff of PIL circa Metal Box, but nothing resembling a melody. For all the hype about "the future", there's nothing here that wasn't done much better by 1987.
Before a sparse but curious audience, CV offer hints of Roses/Oasis-like arrogance but for the most part seem already defeated, hiding beneath their bowl cuts (the follicularly- challenged guitarist excepted) as if embarrassed.
For professed former clubbers, CV seem pitifully unaware of dance culture and on one song the guitarist evokes the pale white boy funk of Level 42 - maybe those club-going days were a long, long time ago. More interesting is vocalist Pete Voss, who looks like a bizarre, bearded Liam Gallagher and like Shaun Ryder, perverts the English language. Brilliant or not, any poetic genius is deadened by Voss's howlingly awful Cockney geezer "raps", which leave Campag sounding like a karaoke Stone Roses fronted by a cabbage seller.
As people drift nervously towards the exits, I ponder whether the bigger travesty is the band's rankness, or that supposedly sentient music journalists have been gullible or desperate enough to cover them. Whatever, after an hour of Voss's market-trader ranting, I'm genuinely disappointed to leave without a pound of potatoes.
