Live Music Review: Fuzzhoneys at The Chameleon

Open the evening is local artist Connor Dowling, playing a Billy Bragg style of folk - impassioned strumming rather than intricate finger picking, although less Lahndon and less political than Bragg. What's especially impressive is that he has the confidence to play a song that he wrote only two days before the gig.

Then it's time for Fuzzhoneys, the Maltese main event. It's a bit of a cliché to compare all garage rock twosomes to The White Stripes but here it’s totally apt, they have that same bluesy, spat vocals and crunching riffs of early Jack and Meg. Don't Raise Your Voice, the first song that Fuzzhoneys wrote has echoes of Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground, that modern take on Led Zepplin's blues. While they're enjoying being on stage, I'm not sure that they're too keen on the English weather, at one point Caroline, the drummer, says "Malta is sunny, here it's cold, that's why we're sick". New songs Venus and Candy both of which are from the band's forthcoming debut album and while they don't veer a million miles away from the same musical template, there is some gentle evolution going on there.

Babe Punch are at their fantastic frenetic best, kicking straight into Control. It’s a veritable “greatest hits” set featuring all the songs we’ve come to love including Snake Tongue, Judy Moody and their cover of Wicked Game. A cover of Abba's SOS is introduced with the line "have a dance if you feel like it", an invitation that quite a few in the audience take up. They close their set with single Standford but the audience demand an encore of Control since half of them were downstairs when it was played and they missed it. If anything, it's even better the second time around.