"We like Wembley because it's an adjective as well as a noun," says Barenaked Ladies frontman Steven Page. If the definition is up for grabs, let's call this the wembliest gig of the year, from the verb to wemble, meaning to fool about, musically.
Barenaked Ladies are often written off as mere gadflies, clever-clever frat-trash pop with the effrontery to come from Canada. They're something of a phenomenon back home, where their first EP, made in 1991, became the only independent release ever to reach platinum status, and their second, Gordon, stayed 10 months in the charts and sold 800,000 copies.
Maple leaf flags fluttered in the crowd. The band found the rest of the world less sympathetic to their distinctive brand of wilful wackiness. It took the release of a live album, 1997's Rock Spectacle, for Barenaked Ladies to conquer the US, and live performance has always been the cornerstone of their success. It's easy to see why. Their clean-cut frothiness lacks soul on record. Onstage, their energy is a virtue: you forget the essential soullessness because you're having a good time.
It helps that Page and co-frontman Ed Robertson are easy performers. It's no coincidence the band started life as a warm-up act for a comedy troupe. Swathes of this Wembley gig are devoted to ridiculing Germany, where they've recently toured - they improvise a song about that country's favourite haircut, the mullet. The venue's security team cops it too: one is humiliated at camcorder-point into strumming the guitar riff to the band's high-powered rehash of the Kinks' You Really Got Me Going. It could all be ghastly, but the band are generous in spirit and devoid of self-importance. They lampoon rock posturing. Tubby Page frets his guitar between his thighs and leaps, ungainly, from the drum podium. He waltzes with Robertson and they kiss.
Not that the band's musical accomplishment is negligible. The tunes stand up well. Jim Creeggan does a classical turn on the electric double-bass. Page' s voice is surprisingly rich, notably on the ballad Break your Heart and on, um, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Memories. But the Barenaked Ladies are, to their credit, less interested in their art than in entertainment. Their live performance belongs in the tradition of Canadian musical comics Corky and the Juice Pigs no less than in the rock mainstream. By its end, they're haring around the stage, animating a satiric medley of hip-hop, Broadway and rock pastiches. And you can't get much wemblier than that.
