Pussycat And The Dirty Johnsons
Stereo Juggernaut
Screamin' Sugar Skulls
Club For Losers @ St Moritz Club, London
Friday May 13 2011

Soho isn't what it used to be. Once an edgy (and sometimes dodgy) mix of glam and sleaze, where low life and high life met to dance their mess around, these days London W1 is all coffee bar chains and designer sushi restaurants. A tourist-friendly zone for browsing and sluicing at West End prices, without much of the old edge - and certainly without much rock 'n' roll.

At least, that's how it might seem if you don't know where to look.

Walk up Wardour Street until you reach the long-closed Marquee, now redeveloped into wannabe-Manhattan 'loft apartments' - which in itself tells you everything you need to know about how Soho has changed. Cross the road and keep an eye out for an anonymous door in deceptively respectable pastel green. This is the entrance to the St. Moritz Club, a basement labyrinth that's hosted rock 'n' roll rackets since the sixties. It's hosting a few more tonight, under the banner of Club For Losers - not the most inspiring name, I'll grant you. But the noise will be good.

If the stage at the St. Moritz Club was any smaller, you'd have to locate it with an electron micoscope. It would be a tight fit for a minimalist electro-duo - but our first band tonight, the Screamin' Sugar Skulls, are a five-piece rockabilly outfit, complete with double bass. Fitting everyone on stage is a feat of spatial logistics so impressive it's almost worth the price of admission by itself.

The Skulls crank up a good old 'billy brew. They're too amiable and good-time to be outright psychobilly, too rough-edged and punky to be straight-up 50s rockabilly reivalists, but somewhere between those extremes there's a niche where the Screamin' Sugar Skulls fit in.

The singer, feisty but friendly, eyeballs the crowd in her eyeball print dress, and leads the band through their set of good ol' hoedowns.

Sure, the Screamin' Sugar Skulls are not doing anything new - but then, for any kind of 'billy band, that's hardly the point. This is good-natured good-time music with just enough of a ramshackle punker spirit to stop it getting soft, and on that level the Skulls are just fine.

I can't help wondering if whoever booked Stereo Juggernaut tonight picked their name out of a hat at random. Or maybe they were added to the bill deliberately, to add a wild card element to tonight's entertainment. Stereo Juggernaut look like a regular rock band - guitar, bass, drums, keyboard - and their music is certainly fast and loud, with punk-rock friendly quantities of buzzsaw guitar. But as soon as the beat drops, it's obvious that for all their guitar-toting rock-band image, Stereo Juggernaut are techno kidz through and through.

The Stereo Juggernaut racket is built upon frantic, jittery pumping-thumping techno beat workouts, which sometimes get so manic and speedfreaky the rhythms teeter on the edge of the gabba zone.

Then they'll bring on shamelessly OTT hands-in-the-air Ibiza anthem breakdowns, and slap a rousing stadium-rock chorus over the whole sonic caboodle.

It's as if the band are influenced in equal parts by Atari Teenage Riot, The Prodigy, and Bon Jovi, and that's quite a package for the close confines of the St. Moritz club. Surely music this fast and frenziedly grandiose should be performed on a big stage in an aircraft hangar somewere, as part of some all-nite rock 'n' rave event.

Amazingly, Stereo Juggernaut win over the punkabilly contingent who make up most of tonight's audience, which must count as a minor miracle given the stark incompatibility of their slammin' techno-core with the other bands' more traditionally rockin' sounds. Fast and loud does it every time, it would seem.

Pussycat And The Dirty Johnsons might've located themselves on the more traditional side of the rock 'n' roll fence - they don't deal in gabba crossover anthems, that's for sure - but they kick things around with plenty of their own style. Much of this style comes down to Puss Johnson herself, all ears and tail and boots and attitude, prowling around the audience as if claiming the whole venue as her territory. The boys in the band wallop out some chunky riffs - guitars as crunchy as Go-Gat - and everyone in the room starts feeling feline.

The Johnsons' brew of mutant blues riffery over a no-frills backbeat gets almost Beefheartian at times - check the dang-dang-dang-a-dang guitar that underpins 'Trouble With The Devil' and you could almost believe Zoot Horn Rollo is in the room.

Puss Johnson's vocals are paint-stripper powerful without ever shading into a shout, and maybe all this illustrates a point about Pussycat and The Dirty Johnsons that needs to be made.

Despite the cat costume, the deliberately daft name, and the general air of humourous hoopla that surrounds the band, this is an outfit that's cooking up something all their own with the essential ingredients of ye olde rock 'n' roll.

Pussycat And The Dirty Johnsons are original and distinctive in a way that the Screamin' Sugar Skulls - for all their undoubted entertainment value - are not. Long may those cool cats roam the streets of Soho, that's what I say.

Pussycat And The Dirty Johnsons: MySpace | Facebook

Stereo Juggernaut: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Screamin' Sugar Skulls: Website | MySpace | Facebook

For more photos from this gig, find the bands by name here.