Barely Legal

Jamie Collinson, head of Big Dada, argues over at the Guardian arts blog that:

"[A] new, optimistic strain of teenage life is... witnessed in the rise of the all ages club night, previously guaranteed to raise a sneer from any self-respecting youth. Across the country, canny promoters have discovered that booking hungry, youthful MySpace sensations guarantees a huge turnout of wildly enthusiastic under-18s. These nights are a sight to behold, with near-hysteria breaking out over unsigned acts and London-weary, bigger-name artists discovering with surprise what it really means to be mobbed."

This follows an article in the Observer last February about all-ages gigs and another one in the Guardian last week. This is evidently going to be big in 2007, not least because the music press has already decided it is.

But as with any such 'movement' – see also nu rave - the sheer newness comes first, the clothes come second, and the music comes a distance third if it's lucky. (This neophilia, of course, is standard in arts coverage: a quite good first novel/play/film/album nearly always gets more attention than a really great second novel/play/film/album.) Consequently, all this 'near-hysteria' becomes about 90% less exciting when you get on Myspace and actually listen to the music that is provoking micro-Beatlemania all over London.

I won't name names in case battalions of their angry fans arrive here via Google – and also because we have been nice about some of these people at Dummy before – but so much of it is fatally casual and derivative, getting by on nothing but a cheeky smile and a wink and an offer to buy you a pint which never appears. This is because bands can now so easily go into a rehearsal room, put up a demo on Myspace, and attract Myspace friends like flies to a carcass even if they're fake. A lot of these bands would probably have been good in about a year's time, but because they're hyped so early, they get stuck with a case of arrested development.

If you're fifteen yourself, then obviously you'd want to associate yourself with this all-ages scene, if only so your friends can get in to your gigs. But what about the ones who are in their twenties but still play to audiences of teenagers? Now, we learnt last week that cynicism leads to heart disease, so forgive me if I drop dead mid-sentence, but then there are lots of ways of explaining why a grown man might want to surround himself with adoring fourteen-year-old girls, and the one I'm going to give you is not the most cynical of those.

My point is, don't you think it's probably easier to impress a young audience who are at their very first gig and have never heard a Clash album than an adult one who saw the Psychocandy tour and will never, ever like anything as much again? Could this be why some bands – and the 'canny promoters' - are lunging at the all-ages market: they know that, realistically, they won't succeed in the real world simply because they aren't very good? If you think young rock stars aren't so calculating, consider the confession by Jamie Reynolds (lead singer of Klaxons, the kings of 2007's even more factitious 'scene') that he meticulously planned his career according to the formula set out by the KLF in their book The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way. These boys saw a commercial opportunity and they went for it – they're not idiots. They invented a product and people bought it - what higher praise could there possibly be?

Naturally there are also a lot of genuine talents, like Patrick Wolf, who have played all-ages gigs. And I suppose all these bands are probably thrilling live. But I hope they realise this strategy isn't going to work for long. Jump forward a year: the album comes out, and it sounds like, in the words of Love Is All, 'nine times that same song', and indeed 'that same song' was much better on Up The Bracket – plus even the kids who thought they'd love this band forever have probably moved on to emo or grime. No, there's nothing wrong with wanting to appeal to the young – but I'm not yet convinced that this stuff is worth the time of anyone who's actually old enough to get into proper gigs - not when there are so many bands out there who appeal to the young without flippantly insulting the intelligence of the rest of us.