You used to know where you were with Britain's style leaders. The ultra-hip were trend-setters, exploring fashion's cutting edge and treading where the high street would tread six months on. Punk, new romanticism and acid house were all discovered first by London's trendies.
Recently, however, our opinion-formers seem to have begun forming opinions only a certifiable lunatic could share. Just as no sentient human outside of Shoreditch is liable to grow their hair into an "ironic" mullet, so the rest of the country has proved resistant to the charms of electroclash, the fashionistas' 1980s-referencing soundtrack du jour. Despite acres of press and hours of radio play, there has been no electroclash smash.
This presents a problem for Dot Allison. In search of a career boost after the inexplicable failure of her superb early 1990s chill-out trio One Dove and her lukewarm singer-songwriter-ish 1999 solo album, Afterglow, Allison has firmly nailed her colours to the electroclash mast. Tonight, aged analogue synthesizers wheeze and bleep, early-80s hip-hop beats thump and a guitarist strums along New Order-influenced lines. It sounds very vogueish, but the songs themselves are alienating and unmemorable.
That may be the point. The standard defence of electroclash is that it is meant to revel in style over content, but there's not a lot of style on offer either. Allison is no great shakes as a performer. Wearing a face that suggests she is on her way to the headmaster's office, she blankly repeats her one-line lyrics - "We are science", "I think I love you" - while films of riots, crash test dummies and cartoon violence flash behind her. The effect is clearly intended to evoke the soul-destroying ennui of urban existence, but it is misjudged. The gap between what's happening on the screens and what's coming out of the speakers is simply too great. You end up watching people punch policemen while listening to music with about as much insurrectionary fervour as an episode of The Archers: not the sound of a revolution, but the sound of someone idly flicking through a style magazine and noting that Dolce and Gabbana's zebra-stripe watch is to die for.
