Reviews

Hadouken!

Seeing the marauding hoardes of teenagers roaming around in packs, necking bottles of alco-pops and setting fire to glo-sticks in order to pour the radioactive-looking goo inside over their heads, my inner mum wants to tell them all off. And this is before we get to the actual band come on stage.

When they do, what they deliver is something of an oddity. Massively hyped by the NME as the hot young bucks of the Nu-Rave movement, their music is a call to arms for Britain's youth to put down their schoolbooks, daub florescent paint all over their faces and act as though they've taken lots of Class As.

And what music it is too - a veritable chemistry experiment of whoop whoop noises, emo vocal histrionics and damn dirty grime, like Dizzee Rascal mud wrestling with My Chemical Romance for kicks, while the Klaxons chuck on more sticky stuff.

Once you manage to decipher the words their rather attractive frontman is spitting out like bullets (and suppress your astonishment at just how many glo-sticks to the head one man can take in a single night), you realise just why they're so popular.

Their songs speak of pathetic indie girls with Lego hair, crap Saturday jobs stacking shelves in Tesco’s and the mind-numbing boredom of going out with someone who can only say the word "errrrrrrr". Plus, any band who inspire their crowd to throw old-school Gameboys at them have to be applauded.

There's no real longevity to Hadouken!. As soon as Nu-Rave hangs its sloganed t-shirt up, they'll probably slump back to their temp jobs or reform and ride the bandwagon of the next big thing. But for the moment, they're brash, neon teenage fun. The kind your Mum would definitely disapprove of. Enjoy them before the joke gets old.