Ed Harcourt, Scala, London <br></br>Def Leppard/ The Darkness, Guild Hall, Portsmouth <br></br>Rachel Stamp, Camden Palace, London
Arms and the extraordinary man
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Your support makes all the difference.Up there on the stage, there are cellos and clarinets, the trappings of maturity. Ed Harcourt ought to be everything I hate: a meek, ordinary bloke writing traditional songs under his own meek, ordinary name. But somehow, his soaring, soul-stirring melodies overcome my prejudices. The scruffily handsome man with a surname like a type of tennis-playing surface uses the dramatic juxtaposition of light and shade (witness the couplet "Birds will sing for us/ We all die in the end") to convey the ultimate triumph of hope over despair, like a one-man Polyphonic Spree or Flaming Lips. Ed Harcourt's message is a simple one. Someone else put it more succinctly than he, perhaps, ever could: end concealing, try revealing, open your heart.
As regular readers will be aware, I mention The Darkness roughly as often as my colleague over on the radio column mentions The Archers. It's time for another progress report on the high camp heavy rockers I discovered two years ago in a club in Kentish Town. In that time, they've gone from pretending they're a stadium metal monster in low-ceilinged pubs, to the brink of actually becoming such a beast for real. Suddenly, things are starting to happen: there are at least two deals on the table from very big record companies, there's a Single Of The Week in Kerrang!, there's an imminent assault on America, and right now, they're touring with a bona fide stadium metal monster, Def Leppard.
Glory will be theirs, if only singer Justin Hawkins can stay out of hospital. On the first date, he accidentally punched through a false ceiling and pulled half a ton of rubble down on top of himself. On the second, he contrived to split his lip on both the inside and outside. On the third, he broke his toe while trashing a chair in a moment of dressing-room rage, and tonight needs a painkilling injection to perform at all. When he returns to earth from his first star-jump, he winces, and those of us in the know do too. Before the (blistering) single "Get Your Hands Off My Woman, Motherfucker", he requires a trouser roadie to help him change into his (frankly indecent) zebra print jumpsuit. If Justin survives to the end of this tour without winding up in a wheelchair, it'll be a miracle. One day someone will make a film about this band, but it won't be as funny as the real thing.
For the first time in a decade, Joe Elliott has emerged from his castle in Ireland and taken Def Leppard on tour, and the fans are out in force. The Leppard faithful – Leppers? – are a stony-faced lot, middle-aged rockers who lost their mullets long ago but have dusted off their leathers for one night only. They don't respond kindly to the Darkness's antics, nor indeed the likes of me.
Def Leppard were never cool in the first place and, like Quo and Jovi but unlike AC/DC and Thin Lizzy, are beyond rehabilitation by hipster revisionists: there are no Hoxton fins in the Guild Hall. There was never much to snag your interest with Leppard, aside from countless lame "armless fun" gags at the expense of car crash surviving drummer Rick Allen. But once they've got the latest album out of their system, a rock is not out of the question: "Photograph" is a stone cold classic by anyone's standards, and if "Pour Some Sugar On Me" doesn't cause rhythmic arm-punching, check that you still have one.
God only knows what the Leppers would have made of Rachel Stamp. Other than David Ryder-Prangley, there's only one man alive who could carry off a black mesh crop-top and a pair of skin-tight see-through lace trousers with a heart-shaped panel cut into the butt, and he's thousands of miles away in Minneapolis. Rachel Stamp are cartoon characters in human form and Ryder-Prangley runs their show, punctuating the Stamps' dynamic glam-metal with theatrical pouts and finger-jabs. After a strutting, imperious performance, DRP threatens to drop his trousers unless we behave. He's barely turned away before one over-excited girl fan pulls them down for him. He was, as any High Court judge would tell you, asking for it.
Def Leppard/The Darkness: Barrowland, Glasgow (0141 339 8383), Monday
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