Cousteau’s close-up on eternal gender-duelling

Walking in I recall all my dreams: the seductive and stylish pop music with classic vocals emits from the stage and all one can do it surrender to the lust of memories. Cousteau are on stage and, although hardly anything happens on this smallish platform, almost too compact to accommodate six members, this is the encounter of the right intimacy, music for pleasure and to indulge in your fantasies.

Starting slowly, the band takes its time to gather pace and by the time they get to ‘Talking To Myself’, they are rolling like Steely Dan fronted by Scott Walker! Yeah, this is the classic-sized pop music that is hardly made anymore. Add to the mix chansons, blues, cabaret, crooning, pop-rock, jazz, soul, emotions (with a capital E), and platinum vox of the be-suited but extensively tattooed frontman, Liam McCahey.

The overall feel of this sonic wealth, as huge as Niagara Falls, melancholic but it is uplifting pathos, not the depressing kind many emo-rockers peddle. ‘The Last Good Day Of The Year’ (from the self-titled debut) is played while the couple next to me are earnestly at it. Baby-making music? (Whatever gets you through life is our motto!) Quality street is walked tonight, and instead of cold Camden High Street, it feels like we are in a New Orleans’s dive. I wish Cousteau would do a cover, just for the hell of it, to hear what they’d do, for instance, with ‘Alabama Song’?!

Cousteau display much more energy live, it is dreamier on their albums; ‘Salome’ is the one they are promoting now and tonight is the last gig of the tour. (In spite of playing Amsterdam the evening before, they don’t appear to be suffering.) ‘Have You Seen Her’ is representative of songs dealing with real issues rather than the teen-hormones! Woman in a love clinch shouts ‘Encore!’ before the band performs the last song of the main set!? She pleases hard?

Cousteau return but it will never be enough; the ‘Salome’ CD is the in-car entertainment on the drive back… Some great British bands get overlooked while crap like Robbie gets paid 80m squid?! ‘What A Waste’, the late-great Ian Dury used to sing. Cousteau, on the other hand, is a band crying for a full orchestra backing at the Royal Albert Hall and it is easy imagining it but that would destroy this close-up magic.

These are songs to remain together, for make-up sex or any other late-night ‘combat-a-deux’, a stimulant for vespertine escapades (like fast nocturnal driving) and more effective on daily road-fury than all the traffic calming measures: widescreen 5.1 Dolby songs versus low-res chart-dom… It makes you wonder whether FCUK is an acronym for ‘F**k culture UK’!