On The Leveller

Chronically out of key, guitars overloaded to maximum mindsmear, savagely body-slammed, New Model Army's musical conscience is ironically liable to render the serious - as in front row - punter unconscious. A collision of political energy, I loved every gruelling second.

Bands get the audiences they deserve while Joolz, because she is so often in a support slot, doesn't. Luckily for her and us, she has the skin-searing sarcasm and dominating personality necessary to embarrass hecklers and chinless chattering bored into silence or shit scar(r)ed underpants.

While everything about Joolz's image howls hard as coal, tough as steel, load as the colour red, bitchy as a barbed wire tongue - the female counterpart to ranting Swells, perhaps - the surprise is how quiet and pedantic her delivery of poems is.

Each word and stanza is carefully weighed and uttered in an almost conversational manner. There is little `act` in her performance, it's simply the poetess talking to us, and it isn't so much the artist herself but her lexical ideas which provide the dramatic impact. That is if you bother to listen to wordscapes such as `Adam's Rib`or `Seventeen`. Most did by the end of her set.

One, Two, Three - GO!
Have you noticed that since the dawn of ooh, several years ago, many bands who make social issues a central theme of their muse are trios? Why is this? Probably because most of them have a strenuous time trying to make a living, I guess, such as the Neurotics. New Model Army, recently signed to EMI (cue Joolz jokes about being able to spot the record company execs in the audience by their Marillion t-shirts), like the redskins, have the ability to make a fuss...

But in their own fashion which is load and sweaty. Like last week's single's reviewer, there are people who think NMA songs have no atmosphere and they are a second punk generation's Clash. By all the hairs on Garry's chin, that's mistaken. Slade and his comrades in instruments know the pratfalls of their job and stay well away from the sort of Alarm - like pathos which so many identify with emotion but really means an empty gesture.

It's NMA's determination and, well, honesty which lasers through their rock noise live and makes them worthwhile. Slade, unlike say strummer in his prime, knows he's not going to spearhead any form of youth revolt but is equally aware that NMA can be an irritant, a springboard for ideas.

But more than that, the quivering creativity which gives momentum to the band's songs isn't the spurious American motifs which have turned once lean agit-groups such as the clash and Alarm into blubber, and that's refreshing. There is an alternative in British polit-rock to bonehead brains like the Upstarts and the Rejects, and I for one am bloody glad.

You can say it quiet, you can say it load, you can say it proud, but for Marx's sake make it intelligent. New Model Army and Joolz combine all elements. Whether they will combine you together remains to be seen.