“I don’t like kids. Get those bloody kids out of my face,” screams Dick Valentine, as the latest in a succession of crowd surfers is pushed on to the stage. His tongue seems firmly in cheek but as the night progresses, you begin to wonder if he’s become a bit uncomfortable with the level of moshing and crowd surfing indulged in by a packed Village.
Tonight feels more like a freshers’ ball or pissed up student bar gig than anything else. When Valentine speaks between songs he is largely ignored. The kids in the first ten rows seem more intent on pushing into each other than listening to the music. Valentine could drop his pants and nobody would notice. It’s one of those nights, though it is surprising, given that tonight’s show has been sold out for weeks in advance.
The gig in The Village is the first of their UK and Ireland tour on the back of latest album, Señor Smoke. It begins well. ‘Dance Epidemic,’ from the new record is, if you'll pardon the pun, electric. Valentine commands the stage, his best rock moves on show, as a gigantic riff rips through the speakers. More new material follows. ‘Devil Nights’ and ‘Bite Me’ further raise the temperature on stage as the emphasis is placed on the hard rock element of their eclectic back catalogue.
From here on in though things begin to go a bit pear shaped. ‘Gay Bar’, ‘Fire’ and ‘Vibrator’ briefly excite, but by this stage both band and audience have become disinterested. Valentine's jokes receive little response and by the end of the night, he cuts the set list short, rounding up the other members just before they are about to launch into another tune. Nobody really notices. Even ‘Danger! High Voltage’ went off with little fuss.
Afterwards, Valentine is downbeat when talking about the gig. “It was OK”, he says, “Crowd was a little nuts, which can be good sometimes.” Did it annoy him? He smiles. “It was a predominantly male audience,” he says, flexing his muscles. “I would have thought we have a bit more sex appeal than that. That annoyed me!”