The Bees

With a new album to promote, one might expect The Bees to wring their new Octopus LP till it's dry. We've followed them for many years now, laughing at the monkey noises, bobbing our heads to the lilting psychedelia and going "cripes!" at the superb Tamla-esque production of their records, so it's time we let them play some new stuff, yeah? Take us on a little trip round the petals and the nettles and see what the spring season's honey tastes like? Fine. But only for a few minutes. Then we're gonna party like it's nineteen-ninety-hive! (This will stop, I promise you).

To their eternal credit, The Bees only visit songs from their new record for small pockets of this evening's sold-out show. In keeping with this rather stringent attitude to pastures new, so does this review. Forthcoming single 'Who Cares What The Question Is?' is dumb bluesy fun, lolloping about the place like a fat Led Zeppelin outtake and never pretending to be anything more. 'End of the Street' is the same but shorter and weirder. They play a couple more, they sound like a laugh. Let's press on, shall we?

The most cheering aspect of the evening is, oddly, how much The Bees haven't changed over the last few years. They're still white men playing silly rock songs and occasionally wigging out like Lee 'Scratch' Perry, they're still lovably daft and awkward on stage (despite massive brass and wind augmentation), they still retain a "why have all these people come to watch us piss about?" charm, and they're still remarkably hairy. These are positives. Some bands shouldn’t change all that much as they get older, and The Bees never said they would. And when you see people old and young (one elderly gent has peroxide blond hair and the wobbliest knees you ever saw) dancing like goons to the still-ludicrous set-closer 'Chicken Payback' it's hard not to be swayed.

There is fun also to be had with the lengthy (but not too lengthy) instrumentals that veer from cheeky blue-beat to cod-ska in the roll of a joint (not me, Mum), with 'The Russian' garnering particular praise for its instinctive plonks of Hammond and irresistible slow-downs. But ultimately it's the silly rock songs people want to hear. 'Horsemen' sounds suitably chunky and buoyant, with Paul Butler sounding more and more like the indie-pop Percy Sledge with every note he croons and croaks, and the ecstatic encore of 'These Are The Ghosts' smashing along like a Byrdsian chocolatier's convention after they start the disco.

Leaving the Astoria is an experience, not because we got shoved or pushed or beer thrown at us (or even because the toilet attendant jumped me with the soap… he did NOT earn his fifty pence…), but because everyone is stupidly happy. I'm sure there are a million concerts you've been to that you can say this about, but few of them will have been such pure entertainment. There is still no gimmick about The Bees. And don't say, "but they rip off the seventies, that’s a gimmick!", because you've got a Strokes album in your collection, haven't you? That argument only becomes valid when an artist is making inferior music to those that influence them, and The Bees most certainly couldn't be accused of that on the strength of this evening's show.