After a decade and a half of perfecting their affectionate but Chubby Brown-subtle parody of hair metal, you could be forgiven for wondering if the joke might wear a little thin.
And it’s not clear quite where the gag lies in playing an acoustic live show in a small venue populated by hand-picked female ‘fans’, that purports to be the kind of garage a no-hope neighbourhood outfit would start out in. “We’re paying these girls by the minute,” singer Michael Starr admits at one point, and you wonder if there would be any other reason a self-respecting 21st-century female would show up to have Fat Girl dedicated to her, or told she had “cock eye”.
Nonetheless, if you’re a fan you’ll take such questionable ‘bantz’ in good part, and from a purely musical point of view, the acoustic approach, replete with a string section, further proves that it’s SP’s songs rather than their humour that has allowed them to last this long. And the one new song Then You Came In – think of a Poison ballad rewritten by the creators of Freddy Got Fingered – suggests there’s no shortage of bawdy anthems left in their locker.
