ARTICLES
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"He used to drink vinegar in the street to impress his friends." [Lauren Laverne] 
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Lomax, Liverpool LAUREN Laverne is pregnant. Shock! In fact, they're all pregnant, even, one would like to suppose, Johny X. Double shock! "There's an exclusive for you," Lauren giggles, in between swigs of lager. "We're all up the duff. It's worked for everyone else." Well, you can't blame them for trying. Kenickie are God's gift to the charts, an indomitably witty grotto of delights, fizzing with pathos and magic. But they're also bemused victims of the mass apathy afflicting the record-buying public at the moment. Introducing "Stay in the Sun", wryly referred to as "Stay Out Of The Hit Parade" on the setlist, Johnny X spits mischievously: "This is for the four people who bought the album." The bitterness is real, but it's peppered with sadness, although they're far too intelligent to indulge in self-pity. Lauren - her skin so diaphanously pale it would make Snow White look like she's just spent a month strapped to a sunbed - half-heartedly reprimands Johnny: "We're happy with our status." She smiles but her eyes glaze over. As if to kick herself out of the daze, Lauren slips effortlessly into the one-liners, regaling the crowd with a speculative soliloquy on the paucity of Tony Blair's sex life: "That Cherie - she looks a bit dry, if you ask me." But the chief instigator of tonight's theatrics is Johnny X, pulling axe-hero histrionics with guitars half his height. And it is his emancipation from the drums, so joyfully enacted and such an excitable contrast to the girls' veneer of glassy invincibility, that cements the nascent relationship between brother and sister onstage. So, they halt "In You Car" for a quick chat, their intimacy dramatised for the audience, before Lauren shames him with a casual flick of malice - "He used to drink vinegar in the street to impress his friends" - and we all laugh because during any Kenickie gig you become extended members of the band, party to every nudge-nudged joke. You're also irreversibly drawn into their richly coloured emotional landscape. Listen to the melodic subtlety of "I Would Fix You", the rueful heartache of "Weeknights", which sounds like it was recorded straight off a phone call to The Samiritans, and the reflective gloss of "Psychic Defence". Consider how "Magnatron", sung by Marie Du Santiago, is the apotheosis of disco abandonment - complete with Emmy-Kate and Lauren's perfectly synchronised dance routine - rather than a sorry exercise in sniggering irony. For Kenickie will never relinquish the ground they've already claimed, they'll never shut the coffin of indie obscurity on themselves; they need - and respect - public approval too much. Which is why their failure to infiltrate the British consciousness - bar a few memorable editions of "Never Mind the Buzzcocks" - is a loss to us all. Only in authenticity-obsessed 1998 would a band with Kenickie's valour and audacity suffer the ignominy of boasting a reputation that outstrips sales. All we can do is sit patiently, wait for Savage Garden to file their copyright suit against Embrace, and pray that Kenickie survive unscathed. For when their time arrives, it will arrive gloriously. |
