April 11, 1999

London SW7 Royal Albert Hall

[B]Gary Stringer[/B] might have a permanently unshaven chin so prominent he could balance his pint of foaming bull's blood on it while he was simultaneously pleasuring you, your girlfriend and your

"I like tequila!/It mek me happy!" No, sorry, that's Terrorvision. This is Reef - the other mighty-biceped bunch of lantern-jawed provincial troglodytes who bring us lumps of ROCK from way beyond the back of beyond. "Oh! Some more ROCK! How frightfully kind!" we twitter, as our bewigged manservant tips their crudely carved offerings into the already overflowing quarry. "Do please stay and have a bath and a cup of tea."

Reef! Yeah! We know almost nothing about these primitives but what we know ROCKS! They did that "blow me away" advert. Yeah! That ROCKED! And they did "IT'S YER LEDDERS! IT'S YER LEDD-ERRRRS!" on The Ginger Ego Show. And that ROCKED! Like FUCK! So we're not expecting tortured poetry or elegant melancholy or sophisticated sophistry or limp-wristed whimsy or ANY of that namby-pamby, nimbly-pimbly, winky-wanky student pimple-pop slop. No. We anticipate ROCK! We look forward to a screaming AVALANCHE! Huge slabs of granite crashing down out of the lightning-slashed sky! Brutal columns of concrete thrusting up from the frozen tundra! We lay our fragile skulls on the cold stone altar of ROCK and we demand that Reef split them asunder with their heavy flint axes and then FUCK our spurting brains. NOW!

Ooh - the anticipation! The Albert Hall is packed to the rafters with the crhme de la crhme of long-T-shirted teenybopperdom. Kids who ROCK! Kids who've ignored the seductive siren call of balls-achingly pretentious clever-clever student-pop. Kids who've gritted their rotted teeth and kept straight on down the well-rutted yellow-brick, eight-lane Super-Autobahn signposted "ROUTE 666! NO SPEED LIMIT! NO TURNING BACK! DESTINATION - ROCK!" Yeah!

Reef ENTER! The kids ROAR! Reef play a song about "heavy pressure". Then they do "IT'S YER LEDDERS". Except that they've changed it to, um, "Put your hands on". And then they do the new single 'Sweetie'. And then the long-haired singer with the prehensile jaw sits down, fondles an acoustic guitar and sings, "I've got something to say". Or something.

Oh yeah? Well so have I, matey-boy! Like, excuse me, but where's the fucking ROCK?!

Let's be fair. Maybe the venue's just not ROCK enough? BOLLOCKS! This place reeks of WAGNER! The walls are saturated with BEETHOVEN! And these giants of testosterone-overdosed Kraut proto-ROCK are pissed OFF! 'Cos this isn't snarling, savage '70s ROCK! This is 'rock' - the bland, lumpy, Yank-friendly and genetically-modified vegetarian substitute so successfully pioneered by U2 back in the bad-hair decade of the 1980s. Boo!

Extra-Y-chromosomed and super-butch singer Gary Stringer might be possessed of a physique so manly that it makes the recently clog-popped Oliver Reed look like an ultra-weedy seven-stone weakling Belle & Sebastian fan who's six weeks into a strictly maintained wet-lettuce and tofu diet. And he might have a permanently unshaven chin so prominent he could balance his pint of foaming bull's blood on it while he was simultaneously pleasuring you, your girlfriend and your dad. BUT the sad fact is that he sings like Cartman out of South Park.

The rest of Reef strut and pose and preen like a good ROCK band should and the bass goes KUNK! and the drums go THUD! and the guitar goes KERDANG! and KeerUNK! and SKREEOW! but the joint never jumps, the air never fizzes and our cocks, clits and nipples stay defiantly unstiffened because, goddammit, Reef do not - repeat NOT - ROCK! Not even a little bit. Hell, this isn't even gravel.

So what were you expecting? The skull-exploding space-metal of Spiritualized? The dignified grunting savagery of Motvrhead? The apocalyptic death screams of Napalm Death? The gleefully screeching priapic pandemonium of AC/DC?

Fuck yes.

If you're going to be despised by the effete snob intellectuals of the pencil-necked 'indie' music press then it might as well be because you're just too goddamn all-out suck-my-fucking-cock SCARY - and the sad fact is that if Reef said boo to a goose, then the goose would probably yawn in their faces.

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