Pub venues are not always suited to the sensitive or even angry singer/songwriter type, due to the chattering classes who find it easy to chatter even louder over the sound of an acoustic guitar. It’s especially hard when you’ve been put on with three rawk bands. So that’s the situation Lupen Crook finds himself in, aside from the fascinated few at the front. Fortunately his voice is loud and clear and his songs have a bit of a bite which puts him way above the two-a-penny situation his style of ‘show’ would normally find him.

Nothing massively interesting to see here with the Idle Lovers, who possibly couldn’t be any more London-right-now if they tried. It’d be easy to place them alongside the Libertines/Razorlight movement; riffs cruise along in similar styles and lyrics name-check Oxford Street. It’s not that they’re bad per se (they’re not) or don’t have the tunes (they do); they could just do with the charisma to go with it.

South London’s (Morden, to be precise) Good Shoes have it all in spades. Aside from the sickening fact they’re still teens and have only been gigging for four months or so, the quartet have quietly been building up a slew of mini hits in the jerky Maximo Park style. With a self-professed love of the ‘Park and fellow NE tunesmiths The Futureheads - we can add a little bit of Wire and XTC in there too - this too could place Good Shoes in the ‘so-very-now’ category, but if they’re this good after only a handful of gigs then the mind boggles what they’ll be like in another six months. DiS is impressed and will be watching their every move.

When DiS last saw Shout Out Louds it was in a virtually empty pub in Camden. This time it’s considerably fuller and the band get the reception they deserve. Coming onstage with almost no warning, the Moog-driven pop of ’The Comeback’ is the perfect attention-grabber, and this continues for another half-hour of pop gem after pop gem – imagine the shambolic racket of The Features with some added Swedish charm. In short - they look fab, they sound fab, and you better get ready for their songs to stick in your head this summer.