THE PADDINGTONS – Reading Plug & Play, 08/10/08.

Having hung with Pete Doherty during his Libertines heyday and followed hot on the heels of London bands like The Others, The Rifles and The Holloways in 2005, Hull punk-poppets The Paddingtons could be forgiven for beginning to fear that their time had passed. The recent announcement by Carl Barat that Dirty Pretty Things had “run its course” couldn’t have helped matters much, but happily The Paddingtons skip daintily over the corpse of DTP with a new album packed with old fashioned Clash-aping britrock grit. Nestled in the dingiest corner of a Reading industrial estate, the band take the stage at Reading’s Plug & Play and proceed to tear through a set rammed with first album highlights such as ‘50 To A £‘, ‘Sorry’ and ‘Panic Attack’ as well as tracks from new album ‘No Mundane Options’, new single ‘Stand Down’ being a particularly heady highlight.

Although the band seem slightly disappointed by the size of the crowd, it doesn’t serve to dampen their ardour and they continue to lead a frenzied mosh through a dizzying blend of old and new material. One of The Paddington’s strongest appeals is their pacey punk vigour, but therein also lies their main weakness: everything they have to offer has been done so many times before it’s a bit like looking at a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopied facsimile. Ultimately, The Paddingtons stand too close to their influences to see the possibilities that lie beyond them, but when they play a song entitled ‘Hey You (What’s The Point In Anything New)’ with such riotous abandon that the light fittings sway, you begin to suspect that they simply don’t care.