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'.