Album Review

Underground Heroes – Alright Darlin’

• 18th Sep 2007

If you say the title of this single in a mockney, builder-style accent, it will tell you everything you need to know about this band and their style of music: its cockney indie-ska-punk, but from Kent, and more like Madness than the Jam.

Fun and funky but probably a bit too fashionable for its own good, ‘Alright Darlin’’ is one of those songs that’s no doubt going to be taken by mainstream radio and shoved down out throats until we retch up Snakebite and pie. It screams to be sung along to, and you honestly can’t help but bop along to it, a bit like the Ordinary Boys but slightly rougher around the edges.

Describing themselves as “chav punk”, they’re treading a very thin metaphorical line, and as they seem to have been lumped in with such god-awful acts as Towers of London, Kate Nash and Lily Allen, they’ve already fallen to the wrong side. Looks like they’re destined to really get on everyone’s tits in the next year or two – and that’s a real shame. Is this really what the south of England has come to these days? Give me gravy and whippets any day.