JoFo in Soho

Johnny Foreigner at Madame JoJo's, 30/09/08

First of all, despite their name and hearing positive things about them in all the right places, I don't really get Dananananaykroyd, and seeing them did nothing to change that. Their levels of energy were pretty amazing and a couple of songs that locked into a noise section and then pushed and pushed it (twin drummers and all), persisting way past expectations, impressed. That was brief though and left looong sections where none of the multitude of ideas presented connected at all, not helped by frankly baffling between song banter. Perhaps if I'd been down at the front among the hug-outs I would have understood better?

Johnny Foreigner I definitely do get, in that their debut Waited Up Til it Was Light is one of my favourite albums of the year. I love its thrilling combination of Los Campesinos!-esque spiky boy/girl indie pop with twisty guitar noises straight from early Idlewild, and the way they their songs each hurtle through a vast maze of interconnecting ideas and hooks. Thing is that despite listening to the album a great deal, if you ask me what much of it means, or what most of the lyrics actually are, I'll be a bit stuck. In fact, ask me to even name half its songs on hearing, and I'll be a bit stuck. So I might not be best placed to talk about their show in a particularly authoritative way.

This fact made me stand out almost as much as my friend who had never heard of them, becuase Madame JoJo's was packed with fans prepped for every moment. A lot of people who on being told that "Cranes and Cranes and Cranes and Cranes" was next could produce its opening 'baba bababababa!' with no further prompting rather than scrambling to catch up. Who could be relied on to fill in lyrical gaps in non-album tracks as well as to catch crowdsurfing singer Alexei at the close. This is a band already inspiring remarkable loyalty, clearly.

The resultant atmosphere definitely helped the band but it's not hard to see why they've reached such a position. Some of the finer detail and dynamism of album versions was lost as songs become uniformly faster, louder, scrappier, but it was worth it for the power added, for the sight of Alexei wrestling every out there sound from his guitar and Kelly and him joyfully trading alternating lines and even words across stage. When they did they sometimes even resembled a beefed up version of The Delgados circa Domestiques, which can only be a good thing. And though fantastic current single "Salt, Pepa and Spinderella" no longer started in as itchy a state of suspense as on record, they raced through it to 'turn on the real drums!' and lit up the room more forcefully than I'd dreamed possible.

They even managed to keep the momentum going through ever lengthening gaps between songs as they fought technical problems and Alexei's admission that he is too unfit to play without gaps 'like a proper band'. New songs were as intruiging and exciting as old and seemingly everyone went away with a smile on their face. Even the people who repeatedly shouted for "Sometimes, in the Bullring" and didn't get it. At least I think they didn't.