The Wombats

Apollo,

Manchester

08/10/2011

Were legendary film director James Whale to be scooped up and transported via time machine from the set of Bride of Frankenstein to modern day England and asked to construct a popular beat combo from the remains of every indie band from the last two decades, it is highly likely the band he would produce would look something like The Wombats.

From the tips of frontman Matthew Murphy’s hair (closely modelled on The Cure’s Robert Smith) through to the Jarvis Cocker-esque lines and shouty-verse-chorus-verse structure of their anthemic singalongs (which resemble everyone from The Automatic through to Sultans Of Ping with a smidge of Britain’s Got Talent wunderkind Brett Domino thrown in for good measure), The Wombats are the kind of band designed to offer up ‘a good night out’ – and that is what they deliver.

The Apollo positively bounces with euphoria, with ten year old girls jumping up and down next to sixty year old grannies and just about every age in between punching the air and yelling out all of the words to all of the songs as they are bathed in bright swathes of vivid green laser light. By the time the set closes with Wombats’ classic ‘Let’s Dance to Joy Division’, the crowd as far as the eye can see yelling “So happy!” at the tops of their voices, Dr Frankenstein himself wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between The Wombats and the bands from which they are obviously constructed.    

Peter Wild