"We," declared the blonde girl in the DJ booth, "are the Moloko sound system." This was bad news indeed. Every band currently has what it calls a "side project" - stuff that's supposedly so outré it can only be realised outside the confines of the main group. Moloko's is the so-called sound system, a grandiose title for what is basically singer Roisin Murphy and programmer Mark Brydon, augmented by a Theophilus P Wildebeest of a DJ.
So what's the difference between Moloko the band and Moloko the sound system? The former is a Sheffield trip hop duo of unusual melody and charm, the latter a freeform house-music entity unconstrained by structure, tunes or, indeed, words.
On stage, the sound system dispenses with the usual conventions of live music, which is to say they don't bother putting on a show. Labouring under the delusion that a paying crowd welcomes the chance to watch dimly-lit silhouettes "interpret" songs into unrecognisable husks, the two men stripped away everything but the underlying lumbering beats, leaving Murphy to add sporadic cries. To give us our money's worth, the DJ occasionally fanned himself like a lady with the vapours and swooned, "We're gonna rock you!" If only.
But of course, as Murphy and Brydon might maintain, different rules apply to club gigs. And this wasn't just any club but Home, the Leicester Square "superclub" where bouncers wear Dries Van Noten and drinks come with paper coasters to prevent stains to the teak bar. If the laws of live performance can be turned on their head anywhere, it's here, you'd imagine. Anyway, who in this Red Bull-fuelled mob would even be compos mentis enough to notice?
Quite a few, as it happened, and their reaction to the recent top five single, Sing it Back, should be a lesson to Moloko. It cropped up after half an hour of wasteland house, Murphy stepping out front to do it properly. Suddenly the crowd, who'd been dancing indifferently, turned into thrilled, arm-waving fans. See, Moloko? What the people really want is songs they know, with words and a tune and all the stuff your foolish sound-system selves deem unimportant.
