Reviews

Centred round the unduly healthy and youthful looking guitarist/vocalist Michael 'Olga' Algar for their remarkable 28 year jaunt, the 'Dolls are undoubtedly best known for their ridiculously sublime cover of Nellie The Elephant, a top five hit in 1984.

Olga and current bassist Tom Goober pogo and preen around the stage, throwing Status Quo-esque guitar shapes and Dumb and Dumber facial expressions in between darting around each other in a crouching strut like some Blues Brothers of punk parody.

The Toy Dolls (c) Stu Gibson

Yet as fun as they are, The Toy Dolls aren’t dumb. Their irreverent humour may be silly and adolescent but can fair blow the cobwebs off for a Friday night; Yul Brynner Was A Skin-Head, for example, sees a ludicrously large card-board cut-out of the actor as a This Is England style boot-boy in braces, turn-ups, white T-shirt and DM’s unveiled.

However, after coming on at 9pm even the most devoted toy collector would be hard-pushed to urge them to play till the 11pm curfew.

Former Adverts front-man TV Smith certainly isn’t dumb either. In fact, he should be a national institution far above the all-too-easily name-dropped Billy Childish with his scathing, heartfelt and poetic disdain that still captures the hopeful spirit of the original London punk scene.

Doing a solo acoustic set tonight, he’s not unlike a Billy Bragg that stayed true to his ideals, rather than pursuing some idyll. Pouring out solo tracks Lion And The Lamb, Expensive Being Poor, Generation Y and Good Times Are Back, alongside Adverts classics Gary Gilmore’s Eyes and Bored Teenagers, Smith, at age 51, has a rich, gravely voice that soars with a restrained roar of passion and raw intensity.

In a nice touch The Toy Dolls get him up for one of their encores to play Smith’s 1977 punk year-zero classic One Chord Wonders. What at first seemed a rather strange bill between poet and pranksters ended up making perfect sense. Sort of.