The Pigeon Detectives, Arches, Glasgow
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Your support makes all the difference.Leeds' hotly tipped The Pigeon Detectives are a fine band, though admittedly cursed with just about the worst name since The Beatles. Ushered onstage in Glasgow by a riot of glaring searchlights, they provided almost an hour's worth of breakneck guitar-pop anthems – most with a well-crafted sing-along chorus and none even beginning to resemble the soporific token ballad so beloved of many of their contemporaries.
Yet context is everything in pop music. For all that The Pigeon Detectives craft 60 minutes' worth of reasonable, escapist fun, there's nothing to suggest that they're any more epochal than their most famous patrons, Kaiser Chiefs and Dirty Pretty Things. All three are entertaining bands, particularly in the current indie music climate in which every busker with a guitar has seemingly been press-ganged into service at the coal face. Yet while the Pigeons are a cut above your average Jack Penate, they're nowhere near the generation-voicing simplicity of Arctic Monkeys.
No, The Pigeon Detectives are simply a pretty good pop band – and an energetic exercise track for the fans. Lead singer Matt Bowman headed the charge. He and the rest of the band took to the stage in Fonz-like leather jackets, soon flung to the side. Despite the oppressive heat of the venue, Bowman sprang down into the photographers' pit to sing "Stop or Go", and leapt atop a speaker stack during "Better Not Look My Way". The uproarious "Take Her Back" – the band's last single and one of their best songs, a boisterous boy-meets-girl tale with added casual sex – saw him adopt a Christ-like pose while standing on the drums. His reaction to an item of ladies' underwear thrown on to the stage was priceless: he read out the phone number scrawled thereon for anyone else who fancied trying their luck, and then launched it back into the crowd.
All of which added to the air of breakneck entertainment. And tracks like "Can't Control Myself" and "I'm Always Right" certainly suggest that "Take Her Back" and the careering closer "I'm Not Sorry" aren't their only chart-worthy songs.
Yet, with their next Glasgow date at the much-larger Barrowlands, the firestorm of hype surrounding them will push The Pigeon Detectives to a level that might otherwise be beyond them.
Touring to 22 November (www.thepigeondetectives.com)
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