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Live Review
by S. Punkerton
1-7-2003
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| Good Charlotte punk up last London-night |
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Live: Good Charlotte
Astoria, London
Tuesday, July 1, 2003
Good Charlotte: punks in a corpo pop-lot
If San Andreas Faultline (earth crust’s ‘fracture’ that an earthquake may make California halve) were in the mid-Atlantic, it would already be getting wider. The reason being that the gap between UK and USA cultures’ crack is enlarging. For every Good Charlotte the Britons offer Coldplay and The Thrills (OK, the latter are Irish but both bands are signed to the fast-dying major label of this fair isle, EMI) or the mindless nostalgia that is The Darkness. (The kitsch rock of the 1970s revived! Y-y-y?)
Shouldn’t A&R people of EMI go to a competitor act’s gig? The reason being that tweenagers do not want only boy- and girl-outfits, or bland pop-pretence of the Robbie Williams’s ‘diva’-kind but something more rocking, energetic, adrenaline-rushing, due to rattle parent’s cage by being ‘dangerous’! An illusion that is underlined by the auditorium containing chaperoning fathers and eager parents waiting for their joy-soaked offspring outside as if it were a boy-group’s show!
Strange habit of throwing school-ties onstage is commented only once when singing Madden twin picks one up and puts it around his neck with a comment of “Being Avril Lavigne”. Steady boyo, you are not really that far removed from the Li’l Canadian: less manufactured but corpo-peddled to the same indiscriminating youths, supplying a platform for ‘rebellion’. The only diss is against parents, school, partners, friends… There is little room for social conscience among the E-Geners but selfish, the No.1-centred issues that effectively disqualifies it from being – punk.
This onstage quintet (drummer Chris Wilson is only an ‘associate’), dressed in all-black, blast us with huge guitar sounds that balances on the edge of the corpo-pop canyon; it is performed with tonnes of energy spreading through the crowd like a bush-fire and making it going mental: moshing, surfing, devil-signing, singing along… The set is based on the band’s two albums with focus being on the current, ‘The Young And The Hopeless’; their breakthrough hit, ‘Lifestyles Of The Rich And The Famous’, arriving at the end to usher us (some of us old enough to drive) home happily climaxed.
What the final (horizontal?) line may be is that these nubiles, and few boys obviously, are discovering their sexuality via Good Charlotte. Much better than getting one’s hormones awaken by some Boyzone or Blue crap, methinks. Still, GC are like that Micra ad, ‘ModRe’ – modern retro. It recalls the nostalgia although it is never the same and you can’t recycle the (sonic) fashion.
Alas, once again America provides the firepower, the Britishers only supply the emo-bullshit.
S. Punkerton
1-7-2003
Good Charlotte’s album ‘The Young Sand The Hopeless’ is available now on Epic
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