The Guildean Gang, Little Thief, The Inspiration, The Dregs.

Bedford Esquires Lev 2. 20th April 2007.

Four young bands playing indie based pop were on the musical menu for this evening. Although Bedford can’t compete with tonight’s other event, the annual Camden Crawl with venues such as the Dublin Castle and The Purple Turtle hosting a variety of bands, I would like to think anyone dropping into Esquires this evening would be suitably impressed.

At present we seem well blessed with the current crop of young local indie bands and judging by tonight’s performance it’s Biggleswade’s The Guildean Gang who take the honours, closely followed by The Inspiration’.

Watching THE GUILDEAN GANG is quite impressive as they are armed with a rich array of tunes that ignite their huge fan base into some wild behaviour .In fact the door supervisors are at times given a complete run around as the fans try to rush the stage. Songs such as ‘Runnin’Around’ and ‘Everybody Says’ offer much bouncy guitar pop. Their fans are lapping it up and even some more mature individuals at the rear end of the room are spotted bopping around.

Preceding the Biggleswade quartet were THE INSPIRATION whose performance was not affected by some disrespectful people who chatted away while these lads were playing. The Inspiration put on a fine show with the reggae lilt of ‘Rhyme in Metaphors’, a little gem, while ‘Timed Out’ with the worrying refrain of “it hurts” is thought provoking. The scuzzy guitar work on ‘East of Croydon’ crackles with passion. A mention must be made to the bands drummer who wore a rather splendid trilby hat. I was quite envious.

These 2 bands for me outshone both Little Thief and The Dregs. The highly rated LITTLE THIEF seemed to rely more on their look and image than they did on their music, as all the ‘thieves’ donned their thick hoodies. ‘See No Light-Nothing to Lose' is my pick of their set.

Hertfordshire 4-piece THE DREGS were making their Esquires debut. They are a band I saw recently at The Horn in St. Albans and tonight’s performance paled with comparison, with the continual plugging of their new EP just annoying. It completely disrupted the flow of their set and I felt they were slightly intimidated by both stage and audience.