January 31, 2001

Sizer Barker / Cooper Temple Clause: London Camden Monarch

Two tips for the top: Cooper cause A&R frenzy, while Sizer wow with current single 'Day By Day'...

Chaos'n'confusion: that's the Cooper Temple Clause. Like Blur in their pre-tune 'experimental' incarnation Seymour, they've got the lot minus melody and a name your little sister can get her head around. The Monarch - at this point, wall-to-wall music biz types - overlooks such trivialities and swoons in appreciation. The small print can wait. There'll be contracts out on them in the morning.

Not so simple for Liverpool's Sizer Barker. With the crowd now thinned out but bolstered instead by screwball scouse luminaries Space (the bands share management), the Sizers shamble on and set about reclaiming the misty past
for themselves. Tradition looms heavily, and through the fog of verse-chorus laments, you get the impression that, if the Sizers were short of another soft-centre epic from the Lennon/Velvets/erm, Space songbook, they'd happily knit another one for you.

Dome-headed singer Carl Brown, however, has something up his sleeve. He looks and sounds as though he's been through the emotional wars and his reward is their ace card and current single 'Day By Day'. It's a beauty. If only it were to reach Radio One the nation's mums would be captivated by its shameless catchiness (see: er, Space) whilst its Mick Shack-gone-soppy aura would even have Noel nodding along sagely from the backseat of his Roller.

It's a smash, in other words, and for it all the Sizers' other trad crimes - of which there are many - can be commuted. Make it Number One here, just to see the TOTP audience scratch their heads at this oddball band with a diamond in their hands. Bark-ing.

Paul Moody

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