Tags: Belle & Sebastian, Codeine Velvet Club, Jon Lawler, Lou Hickey, The Fratellis
Codeine Velvet Club have got me calling call Hollywood ‘Tinseltown’, name checking Old Blue Eyes and telling strangers in bars that, back in the day, you never had to worry about a dead hooker in the pool so long as you knew the right people. A side project of Fratellis’ front man Jon Lawler and singer-songwriter Lou Hickey, CVC make a spirited attempt to annex the swath of retro musical territory stretching from noir to Nancy Sinatra. The band’s opening thrust – their panzer strike through the Ardennes, if you will – gets things off to a cracking start. This reviewer’s favourite track, ‘Hollywood’, is a punchy number oozing silver screen delight and film noir charm that serves as a sort of manifesto for the rest of the homage-heavy album. Hard on its heels comes the probably-just-as-good-now-I-come-to-think-of-it ‘Vanity Kills’, a Broadway-style show tune that ups the swing and smooch factor with lines like “Life’s a roll of the dice/But you’ll pay the price/When that curtain falls”.
Seriously, serve up these songs on Radio One for long enough and fedora sales would skyrocket. But don’t all rush off to buy shares in Acme Hats Inc. quite yet, because the snag with CVC is that they’re essentially a novelty act – and novelty can get old real fast. ‘Reste Avec Moi’ could be a Kinks’ soundtrack for a hip French film, ‘Like A Full Moon’ is a song that The Coral never quite got round to writing, while ‘Nevada’, orchestrated by Belle & Sebastian’s Mick Cooke, has a woozy romantic beauty. However, this whistle-stop genre tour means that the album never quite breaks free from pastiche. It’s difficult to dislike Lawler and Hickey’s rummage through the musical equivalent of a dressing-up box, but ‘Codeine Velvet Club’ sounds like a parlour game in a way that Amanda Palmer’s Weimar burlesque and Luke Haines’ acidic 1930s anti-nostalgia somehow manage to avoid. I bet CVC had fun making this album and I certainly enjoyed listening to it, but in the end ‘Codeine Velvet Club’ is like Gus Van Sant’s remake of ‘Psycho’ – glossy, well-produced and kinda pointless.
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DaveAxbey is a minor character who became a series regular in season two. A London-based journalist and entertainment industry PR guy, he is depicted as a genre-savvy geek obsessed by videogames, anime and indie music.
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