The Enemy

Concisely designed to inflict the utmost chaos, this: a Coventry band pipping Brummies The Twang to their rightful place at the head of the Black Country Parade (OK, Cov’s not in the Black Country but the parade passes close by) with a song that’ll be mistakenly downloaded by a million dyslexic My Chemical Romance fans. Worse still, their moniker’s destined to cause endless Abbott & Costello-style confusion with The World’s Greatest Rock Weekly™ (“Hey, Tarquin, did you see The Enemy’s Track Of The Week this week?”, “No, which magazine was it in?”, “The NME”, “Yes, but which mag was it in?”, and so on).
The song, meanwhile, is designed to inflict maximum indie dancefloor pandemonium on a quivering provincial Club NME. Mutant Strokes guitars grown to the size of blue whales, funky bassist undergoing epileptic seizure, chantalong lyrics about not very much (“It’s not OK to be this way/It’s not OK to be asleep” – um, innit?) so you’re not distracted from the whopping great Godzilla of a tune that comes charging out of the guitar thunderstorm chorus spitting bloodied chunks of The View, Dirty Pretty Things and Kasabian from its monstrous rock jaws. It’s like the last four years of British rock music has been exposed to near-fatal amounts of gamma radiation and developed superhuman X-ray tuneage and balls the size of breeze blocks. You have simply got to see The Enemy (“Why, what’s in it this week?” etc).