Gig review: Dodgy

Published on Tuesday 2 December 2008 18:53

DODGY BARFLY, GLASGOW

FOR a band to make a successful comeback, it's important that their absence is widely lamented. It's hard to imagine that many people lost sleep because of ephemerally famous cheeky-chappy trio Dodgy's hiatus between 1998 and the return of bassist and singer Nigel Clark last year. Certainly, there were only a handful of people at this show.

To their credit, the Redditch band put in a keen turn that did eventually win over the initially standoffish crowd. But only in spite of an evidently soused Clark's obnoxious havering between tunes (there are only so many low-grade Scottish jokes you can get away with in Glasgow on a Monday night), which served as a reminder that the one thing worse than a pub bore is a pub bore with a mic.

Some of Dodgy's songs are actually fairly well crafted pieces of Beatles, Who and Hollies-influenced British guitar pop. But their longevity hasn't been helped by their shallow veneer of hippyish stoner sentiment (the band's most successful album was titled Free Peace Sweet), nor the fact that one of their biggest hits, If You're Thinking of Me, on repeat listens become almost indistinguishable in places from a Duran Duran ballad.

Good Enough, Dodgy's trademark 1996 hazy summer anthem, at least harked back to a time when we used to actually get such things as summers. But because the song has long since become one of those dreary cudgels of daytime commercial radio, it was hard to get nostalgic even for that.