Tiny Dancers - King's College, London, 5/1/2006

  by Sarah Maybank

published: 7 / 1 / 2007

intro

Sarah Maynard at the Kings College in London watches acoustic pop act Tiny Dancers make an early claim towards being a potential stadium act of the future

Never underestimate the band that gets the pretty girls dancing. When you’re a babe so hot you only have to quiver an eyelash to get slavering males to do your every bidding, why bother moving anything else - ever? But within minutes of Tiny Dancers sauntering on stage, all the fit girls have formed a horseshoe at the front and are clapping like hyped- up circus seals. It’s an achievement so big it’d even strain the elastic of Bernard Manning’s Y-fronts - put it this way, none of the band look like Johnny Depp. With folky, grown-up type melodies that parents tell you will "take a few listens to get", Tiny Dancers evoke Steeleye Span waltzing with Fleetwood Mac on a village green one balmy summer’s evening. They’re great for impressing a date with your sophisticated taste in acoustic pop. But living hell if you’re a Venga Boys fan who inexplicably found themselves at the wrong gig. In a bid to deter Terry Wogan show listeners they do their best to quirk things up. The stage is decorated like a uni fresher girls’ bedroom – all vintage standard lamps, plastic flowers and Russian dolls. Stick-man singer David Kay swirls around deliriously in Prince Charming-era Adam Ant make-up and a floral shirt, and they inject squirts of funk with squelchy synth bleeps hijacked from Hot Chip. But each song is so defiantly listenable there’s not a daytime radio schedule that’d turn it away, even it got the programmer in a headlock and bit off their ears. Are they going to be huge? Let’s examine the evidence. The image: a bunch of science students fronted by an ardent poet-type. Songs so likeable Will Smith is suing for copyright theft. Output likely to be sneered at by snidey-boy journalists, while selling millions by getting girls in all the right places. Don’t fight it, Tiny Dancers. With Coldplay ‘resting’ and Keane in rehab fallout, there’s a stadium-band sized gap waiting to be filled. Your time is now.

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