Widely tipped as ones to watch at the start of the year, Ghosts have strangely failed to explode, although their singles are staples of daytime radio and reviews for their debut album The World is Outside were mostly glowing. The reason, you suspect, is that in a chart still bewilderingly crammed with lads in too-tight jeans peddling production-line punk-pop, the Guildford group aren’t cool enough.
At their biggest solo show to date their collective haircuts alone would have sent trendy teenagers running for the door. The singer Simon Pettigrew boasted a side-flicked schoolboy bowl and two guitarists a frizzy bush of corkscrew curls and a heavy, wedge fringe respectively. More worrying for their unfailingly polite fans was the lack of showmanship on stage. On record, Musical Chairs is punchy piano-pop with an irresistibly chirpy chorus. Live, it arrived with the bounce of early Supergrass but, played by a band who barely moved, it failed to get feet even shuffling.
The dated, pumped-up disco-pop of Stop fared better, partly because Pettigrew requested that fans jump up and down, and they obliged – but the superb former single Stay the Night, a summer anthem in search of a summer, was greeted with gently bobbing heads rather than the dancefloor abandon it deserved. By the time they played a rock revamp of Pussycat Dolls’ Don’t Cha that sapped all fun from the original, Ghosts were smiling and sinking at the same time.
How they turned the gig around was hard to tell – perhaps they stopped waiting for the audience to have fun and began enjoying themselves, or maybe they shed their early nerves – but the second half was a blast.
Advertisement
Ghosts’ bright melodies burst into life. Mind Games and The World is Outside were dynamic anthems of stadium proportions and the forthcoming single Ghosts was a shimmering, electro-tinged stompalong. They even had hundreds of arms waving slowly from side to side for an adventurous encore, the ballad Temporary, which sounds like a Christmas single. The year’s sunniest pop band may soon be wishing for snow.
— The tour continues tomorrow at Guilfest, Guildford; and on July 21 at the O2 Arena, London (supporting Keane)