Damage's newly released album Since You've Been Gone has been described as "exceptional" by their label, but it's not quite enough to divert attention from the fact that this R&B boy band are better known for their friends than their music (unless you happen to be a fierce Lolita who swoons over main fox Jade Jones, as many of this crowd were). It was Damage who discovered Craig David, while Jones is familiar to tabloid readers as Mr Baby Spice.
The album contains a duet by Baby and Jones that proved an unexpected high point at this gig. The Spice Girl skipped out of the wings, drowning in white wool and determinedly loved-up, but the ensuing routine wasn't nearly the act of gross Kylie-and-Jasonness it threatened to be. In fact, they made a sweet couple, pirouetting in an intricate mating dance that climaxed with her hurtling into his arms to thunderous applause.
The real business of the evening, though, was stirring the ladies into a polite frenzy through a carefully calibrated mix of sauce and soul. Even if the soul was lite, it was staggeringly accomplished by the usual boyband standards. Damage are to Westlife what the Beatles were to Herman's Hermits: the pinnacle of the genre. This isn't apparent on their records, but give them a stage, shiny black shirts and the encouragement of a crowd who'd love to swallow them whole, and they shine.
Their voices meshed and bent notes with luxurious ease on an unplugged version of Eric Clapton's Wonderful Tonight. They decamped to separate corners of the stage for a glowing After the Love Has Gone. Inevitably, their own material was less spot-on, and after a few tepid bedroom jams such as Forever, in which Bald Damage and Afro Damage promised to "be loving you till forever", your eyes strayed to the pert tushes offered for inspection. Each time they did a collective shimmy, the squeal monitor inched further into the red until the girls had wailed themselves sick.
This was a successful night all round, and left one even less charitably inclined toward the talentless nobodies who comprise the majority of boy and girl groups. This uplifting, mildly sexy show argued that it doesn't have to be that way.
