Didcot four-piece Very Nice Harry are named after an obscure line from Guy Richie’s only decent film ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ and this fact might suggest they dabble in gangster-worshipping musical scuzziness, but in fact they seem at their happiest when powering through big fat Seventies metal riffs, breaking it up with lashings of scamp-tastic ska. For most of the time, they are pretty well-drilled, though there was the odd late-stage train-wreck; I liked the singer’s wry admonishment, “If we’re going to do that ending, it’s probably best we all do it together”. Not only is that a good line in exasperated schoolmasterish understatement but he can sing pretty well too, in an arch, knowing, Alex Turner vein. Only when he blundered into the lower registers, there to be met by the territorial growling of the rhythm and bass guitars did he sound discomfited.
The second half of the set was noticeably more coherent than the first, so my closing impression was one of increasing admiration. All right, they are bit adolescent, a bit happy-slappy, a bit Reverend and the Makers, but there was definitely more than the odd moment of sly, quirky brilliance; at one point two lead guitar lines combined to give a fleeting impression of Foals playing Thin Lizzy. But bollocks to introducing the band at the end of the set. Only old farts do that. Remember your age.
Apparently, only about two of the fifty most successful songs of the century can be classified as ‘rock’ (they’re probably ‘Sex on Fire’ by Kings of Leon twice), and trawling through Zem’s morbid, interminable set gave some pointers why. They were competent and amiable but safe as slippers, churning out complacent three chord chugs to a rapidly disappearing audience who will have heard the same guitar riff, the same drum beat and the same low to mid-range warble a million billion times before. Mostly in 1959. You just couldn’t leave the room without the indelible impression that rock is a spent force, a dead parrot, a shot wad. I can live with pub rock, but not pub rock of such mind-melting tedium. If you have a moment, the pub they deserve for an eternal residency is the one with only Greene King IPA and wife-beater on tap, a concrete beer garden encrusted with pigeon droppings and a wasp’s bike where the fruit machine should be. The only good thing about the set was that I realised that I was still young enough (though well stricken in years) to get angry about all this. To dredge up (and clean up) another line from Lock Stock: Is Zem a joke for old buggers that young buggers don’t get? Cos I’m not laughing.