Review: Biters, Thekla

Back in the late 1980s, there was a huge global glut of bands like Biters: skinny dudes with Rod Stewart 1973 variant hairstyles playing sleazy glam rock. Hell, kids were even strutting round the rainy streets of Bristol wearing bandanas, cruising the Strip in their fevered imaginations. A large proportion of these bands committed the fatal error of the mystifyingly revered New York Dolls in failing to write any decent songs, and were first to be swept away in the subsequent Darwinian population crash. Biters hail from Atlanta rather than LA and are too young to have been born in the 1980s, let alone 1975 (that’s the title of one of their best stomp-along ditties rather than The 1975 – an especially weedy and anaemic indie act). Something of a companion piece to Bowling for Soup’s 1985, this evokes a rose-tinted, hard rockin’ mid-’70s “when all the kids were cool”, refreshingly at variance with the official version policed with Stalinist zeal by self-appointed rock historians of the punk era.

This being Biters’ first UK tour, they play to an, ahem, select audience, but not an embarrassingly small one. So they fill the boat with smoke and go for it, their tight, energetic set whisking us from Hallucination Generation to a closing cover of Thin Lizzy’s Cowboy Song. Low Lives in High Definition showcases frontman Tuk Smith’s way with a witty lyric and determination to swim against the tide of soulless music-making (“I would’ve sold my Kiss records and bought a machine if I wanted to hear a robot sing”), while The Kids Ain’t Alright, despite its terrible title, casts an amusingly jaundiced eye over his generation (“All the wasted youth watch the vultures feed/They chew on your bones while you watch your phone”). There’s a lot of borrowing going on here, mostly from Cheap Trick, though So Many Nights crosses the line by being a Thin Lizzy facsimile so blatant that it might have been written by Black Star Riders. Restless Hearts is the one everyone knows, prompting a modest singalong, and for those paying attention they even slip in a brief romp through 38 Special’s Hold on Loosely (as also covered by Steel Panther, fact fans).

Big Jeff’s down the front headbanging away, swiftly catching Tuk’s eye and finding himself referred to as “that motherfucker” on several occasions. “You look like Ian Hunter and Marc Bolan had a baby,” chortles the frontman, good-naturedly (yep, all his cultural references are ’70s ones). He pauses for a long, rambling anecdote about smoking crack on Christmas Eve with his mulleted redneck moonshiner Uncle Alvin, much of which is unrepeatable, though it did contain the colourful phrase “the Neapolitan of crack whores”. His likeability and humbleness (“We’re not rock stars – we’re four dudes travelling in a van that smells like a hamster cage”) goes a long way towards papering over the variable quality of Biters’ material and it helps that these anglophiles are clearly having the time of their lives with the language that divides us, savouring the likes of ‘chav’, ‘wanker’ and ‘sorted’ in authentic Nigel Tuffnel accents.