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Giuda celebrate the lumpen end of glam. They’re a five-piece band from Rome who are in love with early-70s stomp-pop with a hefty chunk of Oi!-style bovver-punk and Quo boogie thrown in. Think Cockney Rejects produced by Chinnichap. Don’t expect any bacofoil spacesuits, though.
They come on stage in their vests and muscles, tattoos and stubble, sweat bands on their wrists. Half the band look like they’re about to get into a ruck on the terraces, the other half resemble the kind of geezers who’d leer at women from a building site – in 1973.
Nearly all of their songs are heavy on the ‘Hey!’s and handclaps. Most of their songs – with glorious period titles such as Fat Boy Boogie, Teenage Rebel, Racey Roller and Hey Hey – dispense with compositional niceties and are virtually all chorus. And the band knock ‘em out at a relentless rate – playing nearly 20 in an hour,
Whether or not the conceptually correct Giuda will go beyond the level of music-press in-joke (see also: Earl Brutus) to become a Darkness-level bona fide commercial entity remains to be seen, but the audience – including a least one chap bearing an authentic feather-cut – lap it up. For brevity, economy and sheer dunderheaded simplicity they cannot be beaten. They even encore with Elton’s Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting, for which singer Ntendarere Damas changes out of his sweaty top into a denim jacket open at the waist. Sleeveless, natch.
