Dodging Posh People at Joe Lean's First Gig With His New Band

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As a vaguely functioning music journalist who tends to write about Bands With Guitars In Them, I am legally obliged to spend at least 42% of my waking hours at the Old Blue Last. I feel comfortable there. It’s like an indie Cheers, except instead of everyone knowing your name, most people are too wasted to remember their own mother's. Occasionally, however, an event dictates that you have to emerge bleary-eyed and untangle yourself from your safety net to venture somewhere you are clearly not supposed to be. The kind of place where a doorman will make you stand in the rain for 30 minutes until you are cleansed of your air of povery and K cider.

This is what happened last night when we went to go and see Boyband – former Jing Jang Jonger Joe Lean’s new troupe – play their first gig.

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Considering that poor old Joe’s always come in for a fair amount of stick for basically being Johnny Borrell mk II, the choice of venue – The Edition Hotel, a swanky, marble-floored affair off Oxford Street – seemed like a strange one. With his new-found, spit’n’sawdust, man-of-the-people image (he has some stubble now) you would have thought Joe would want to discourage any thoughts that he might still be a bit of a wally. Instead, we join a surprisingly decent-length queue of people getting soggy outside as various genuine hotel-frequenters wander past, wondering why their £500-a-night haven is being used as a soup kitchen for the evening.

Metres around the corner from the Joe Lean and The Jing Jang Jong HMV album in-store that never was, our hapless queue is suddenly more than just a group of wet people looking for a night out. We are The Rolling Stones finally headlining Glastonbury, we are Mutya, Keisha and Siobhan giving the pseudo-Babes the middle finger, except we’re simply united in our love for a man that used to walk around in a pair of gold jeans.

Once inside the venue, we’re swiftly ushered straight ahead and into the basement where those without a mortgage belong. Sussing out the financial tone of the venue quite quickly (an over-saturation of doormen generally helps with this detective work), I begrudgingly order a soda water and am charged four pounds. A DJ plays the kind of music that you’d expect if you were put on hold to the Ibiza Rocks helpline, and everyone stands around looking a bit unsure of themselves.

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Barely 20 minutes later and the BOYBAND of our dreams take to the stage and save us all from running out of small talk. A man who looks like the stacked one from Kings of Leon and a man who was possibly once in The Rakes appear. They are both wielding guitars. The other boys in the band are comprised of a relatively non-descript drummer and a bassist in a rollneck with really good hair, who is obviously the token hot one. And, of course, Joe – who emerges through the crowd like Moses, parting the sea of his own destiny to assume his rightful place, on stage during a confusing situation. “Alright?” he drawls, like a cockney Johnny Rotten. Did Joe always used to be a cockney? No, he definitely didn’t. Still, what the hell. This isn’t real life. This is rock’n’roll.

They kick off with “Motorcycle Boy”, the group’s debut offering which was unveiled last week and labeled on these very pages as “pretty good”. A tightly-wound, snarling slice of indie rock underpinned by TOY-style guitar swirls, it translates well live. Despite the general Made In Chelsea-ness of the situation, Boyband are actually doing a decent job of being a proper band. A couple of tracks not entirely dissimilar to his JJJ days follow – a soaring chorus here, some girl group harmonies there – while Joe minces around, staring deadpan into the middle distance and finger-clicking like a meerkat on strings. It’s all ridiculously affected, but that’s kind of the beauty of it.

There’s a track that opens with the drum beat from Primal Scream’s “Rocks” before turning into a 60s-esque banger, a ballad that opens with Joe crooning “you got me wrong” and a riff-heavy Strokes-esque number called “Tiger Stripes” that features more self-deprecating lines seemingly referencing his chequered indie past. Indeed, if there’s one thing that’s noticeably different between Joe Lean circa 2007 and Joe Lean 2.0, it’s that this one is clearly a little more self-aware than his bombastic former self. “I thought it was forever/ But now I can see it’s over” snarls one track, while closer “Give It Up” features a repeated chorus of “You’re bringing me down”. Not to get all psycho-babble on the situation, but you can probably take a fair stab at the common concept between the two. Primarily though, the main revelation is that the whole gig is actually, well, pretty good.

After the band left, I spoke to a group of proper #lads at the front who kept shouting for Boyband to play their penultimate song again and cheering. They’d never heard of Joe Lean or the Jing Jang Jong; they were just in the area and wondered what the queue was for. Maybe there’s life in the old dog yet…

Follow Lisa on Twitter: @LisaAnneWright