They don’t make them like The Supernovas any more. The four-piece cut a Holloway swagger right through the poshest precinct in town but arrived at the shop on time, pint of Gaymers, Sherman button-downs, Fred Perry woollies and box-fresh Clarks appropriately on tootsie.
It was the Clarks campaign party the night before, and the band had the daunting task of opening to a music industry crowd – they rode it well and are invigorated, if suffering today.
They start with an eel & pie classic: City Of Smoke, ‘The girls all drink Bacardi, the boys all drink in rounds’, a cheeky little number that cheered the store on yet another grizzled February Friday. Then came Ace Face, a song warning against the lure of “the pleasures of being a cocaine dealer on a pub on the Holloway road”.
Panashe, playing bass was dressed head-to-toe in black, while Rizo, on lead guitar and drummer Moses were looking needle-sharp - one in white-collared checked shirt and Moses Linton Kwesi Johnson’s gobbing image with goatee, pork pie hat and glasses.
Mod is a huge influence for Joei, who remembers his first big gig in 2002 to see Oasis at Finsbury Park “it was just down the road from my house and when I got there there were mods sitting on the grass everywhere. It was the first time that I ever properly felt like one.”
The Supernovas seldom tell the truth slant; in their following song they summed up the recession to fat lunch-breaking desk clerks smiling above big tie knots: “Stick your politics, gets on my tits I’m going home to paint my nails instead.”
The Supers have got a song called Shot Down By The Fuzz. Do people actually say fuzz anymore? But that’s the kind of band they are – old-school, unaffected – a lot better than O The Children.
It’s certainly true that The Supernovas are perhaps too unselfconscious for their own good. However if they persevere, and insist on flicking the bird to scenesters they’ll keep doing what they did today, and enouncing what we think in a straight, entertaining way. Best-preserved slice of Cockney since the pickled onion.
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