Upstairs At The Garage	Giglist.com
n/a	30 August 2000

The first thing that strikes you about the Irish rock combo The Marbles is that they should sack their stylist. You can make a pretty good guess at the sound this cascade of velour and demin will make just by looking at them. Part Thin Lizzy, part Small Faces with a welcolme dollop of the Banana Splits - there's nothing here that your dad wouldn't approve of but some of the songs have real quality and all of them are bashed out with the kind of gusto that Noel Gallagher would kill for these days. This was one of their first gigs in the UK with their new frontman, Glaswegian Marco Rea, and the band took time to warm up the dog-eared but intimate confines of the Garage's upstairs venue. But the arrival of the band's recent single - the marvellous Slip into Sound - propelled the band into something approaching top gear and began the process of converting the audience. Further highlights included the lascivious guitar licks of Joust - proof that guitarist Johnny McGlynn can do a passable Jonny Greenwood as well as his Jimmy Page - and some exuberant, powerchording 'n' riffery on Seems To Me which almost transformed the coffin-like Garage into a windswept Wembley Stadium. Almost. Rea will have to work a little on his stagecraft if he wants to reliably find the G spot of a bigger audience - although there was something endearingly honest about his comments that "You've been a great fucking audience - that's our manager there (and) he's our only fucking fan!". But the final trio of songs - Stay With Me, Falling Overground and Walk Away - demonstrate that this band have a tightly-knit core of material that have the melodies and punch to do a job in any venue. The band certainly looked like they were having fun by the end and left the Upstairs's notoriously hard-boiled audience in a solidly appreciative, if not ecstatic, mood. And, fuck it, if Airfixed retro bands like Toploader can find a mainstream audience then The Marbles deserve their chance to rock and, er, roll...