Gig review: NME Awards Tour 2010

Published on Sunday 7 February 2010 21:55

BARROWLAND, GLASGOW ***

THERE are no heroes on this year's NME Awards Tour; no bands you see and instantly adore, and will on to as much deserved success as they can possibly amass over the rest of the year. This crop of hype academy graduates are, in terms of NME Tours past, less Franz Ferdinand or Friendly Fires and more the Cribs, a bunch of workmanlike indie boy bands who don't so much grab the imagination as politely hold the door open for it.

Brooklynite quartet the Drums aren't a bad shout for this show's traditional ploy of putting the best band on first, a blend of goth-punk, surf-rock and lo-fi indie of the kind pioneered by Factory Records, all planed off into an agreeably commercial proposition.

The following Big Pink take the band of the evening title on two counts, however: in Dominoes, they have the best song played over the course, and they also feature the only female musician of the night in drummer Akiko Matsuura. In many ways, this is the show's most disappointing facet, the indication that British indie-pop will once more be a boys-only hegemony in 2010.

For Bombay Bicycle Club and headliners the Maccabees, only faint praise is necessary. Both are good groups, who have obviously taken note of the quirky Vampire Weekend's success: the latter outfit combine speeded-up Afrobeat-light rhythms with mariachi brass and even a bouncy cover of Orange Juice's Rip It Up.

Mortifyingly, only a tiny percentage of the crowd greets the song with the excitement it deserves, but they do go wild for the rest of the band's set, including X-Ray, No Kind Words and All in Your Rows.