Way over across the black river, the Canary Wharf spires’ lights winked through the murk of cloud, turning the sky into a boiling sump of bilge. Northern weather had arrived with the northern posse, and Alias Kid were playing the Amersham Arms on a south-east London Saturday night so wet and fetid it required a certain kind of lift. And like the men’s toilet in the Arms, New Cross had also flooded, but none of this had deterred the crowds who were in need of what Paul Weller once called “the holy communion of rock and roll”.

Second on the bill, Alias Kid took to the stage in good humour. Clad in black, loose of limb and sardonic and quick to embrace Alan McGee [also DJ for the night], the man who discovered them and on whose record label they now enjoy a certain kind of rare elevation, they crashed through a seven-song set and managed to steer the droves of leather-jacketed devotees of bourbon from the bar towards the stage. Which in insouciant London town is no mean feat.

McGee, his shades perched as ever upon a nose which over the course of three decades has sniffed out every possible commercial opportunity the rock idiom has had to offer, watched his new disciples from the wings, finally hitting their stride with ‘Shot Through’ before segue-waying into a cover of ‘Anarchy In The UK’ by The Sex Pistols.

The surprise of the night is how punk the band sounds live when perhaps the expectation was that a large helping of the Brothers Gallagher would be served up. Yet it would seem that McGee, that ever-canny necromancer of the music business, is working to another schematic. And with their debut album, ‘Revolt To Revolt’, out this spring on Cherry Red Records, expect Alias Kid to be playing to much larger audiences in much larger venues…

Jason Holmes

@JasonAHolmes

Photo: Zsuzsa Nagy