London Zig Zag Club

A FOOTBALL GIG in Madrid and the general lack of public hysteria over the Nightingales caused a disgustingly tiny turnout. Just some twenty or thirty hardy souls creeping around in the gaping spaces.

The Zig Zag Club has a sizeable house PA and lighting rig which gives the illusion of walking into a record company sponsored date on a major promote-an-album tour. For the Nightingales, all this is a trifle incongruous. The garish blazing of the reds, blues and greens does nothing to alter the tatty splendour of Robert Lloyd's perennial jacket.

There is something extremely punky about the Nightingales. It's the kind of punkiness that the Subway Sect had in 1977 or that the Buzzcocks had when Garth was still with them. The usurping of the stage for a crack at individual expression rather than some bondage-uniformed tribalist sloganeering.

Five years on, we now have–save for the smallminded leather-wearing Punk circles–ABC, Human League, Soft Cell and all that golden-new-age-of-pop stuff. The 'poison in the system' becoming the new blood in the boardroom. Or, as Robert Lloyd succinctly observes, 'the big cocks still crow the loudest'.

His band thrash away. The two guitarists make tinny, scratching noises. The one with the baggiest trousers, makes little looping runs around his corner of the stage. The bass player has a stoic countenance. The drummer is barechested and working his butt off, like some US HM skin-beater another lighting-assisted illusion. They make a crashing rattle and roll like a hundred dustbin lids being hit with broom handles. Robert ambles backwards and forwards, opens bottles of Guinness and hands one to somebody at the front. He reels off these lyrics: excelsior! The Nightingales have the songs. A seemingly non-stop verbal action-catalogue of poignant two-faced one-liners.

They are rapidly becoming my favourite group but I would hate them to be merely a critics' choice-of-the-day. 'I've always hated teachers pets' sings Robert. But they never be 'stars' either. Firstly, they probably don't want to be. Secondly, they're too common. 1982 heralds the return of distance between performer and audience; the Nightingales are the kind of people you rub shoulders with at jumble sales. There is no cultivated and successfully-exploited mystique.

At one point, Robert Lloyd turned his head sideways on to the observers and craftily began picking his nose, presumably hoping the act wouldn't be-spotted. Afterwards he rolled the snot into a ball and put it in his pocket. Martin Fry, eat your heart out!