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Was it really only in November that Jake Bugg played King Tut's? A full three months later, here he was, headlining at the Academy, in a show that had originally been scheduled for the smaller ABC. Whatever was going on, it must've been really special, mustn't it?
Well, no. On Saturday Keith Bruce wrote about the danger of new music, such as that of Jake Bugg, suffering at the hands of revived rock acts. But why bother with new acts when they so shamelessly recycle the sounds of their grandpa's record collections? Why listen to the likes of Jake Bugg when you could stick on any Dylan track and get the real deal?
Don't get me wrong. Bugg has clearly tapped in to some rich seam of "yoof kulchur" which has adopted this kind of stuff as it's own and good luck to him. I am sure most of them wouldn't know a Bob Dylan from an Adele, but, hopefully, by listening to this retrofest, they might go back and listen to how it should be done. In the meantime, they hailed the anonymous looking lad who shuffled on to the Academy stage as a conquering hero. His material ranged from an okay kind of rockabilly, to solo acoustic ballads, to Oasis-style belters and it was one of those, the single Two Fingers, that was the first to make any impression, the "I got out" line being belted out by the cameraphone-wielding masses with gusto.
None of it was bad. He sang with total conviction and had a fine band. It was just that, for the future of retro-rock, it was all so mind-bogglingly ordinary.
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