Specs Mark The Spot

The Autumn Store Presents: The Deirdres/Winston Echo/Amida, Sunflower Lounge, Birmingham, Saturday May 10 2008, 8.45pm.

In honour of all things Deirdre, the Autumn Store organisers have put six pictures of Corrie character Deirdre Barlow/Raschid in various places within the venue for customers to take a punt as to how many and enter a prize draw of merchandise from all three bands playing. The correct answer is six, and your short-sighted scribe only found two, so no spotters badge for Dead Kenny tonight. Your concentrating correspondent does, however, manage to catch all three acts and these are our views.

Manchester's Amida are hurried on first on the bill so that they can get the train back home, but with a bit of decent fortune their slightly shambly and properly jangly take on alternative pop will bring in enough moolah to get themselves a van real soon. The band take time to thank the audience for being so polite and paying attention to their tunes before beating a path to New Street station. Overall impression: amiable, humble, could well be worth checking them out again real soon.

Winston Echo is a roundish gentleman from Wellingborough who has his own public transport woes to relate, as well as singing some observational lo-fi pop with a little bit of instrumental assistance from some bloke from The Retro Spankees. The missing link between Johnny Vegas and Billy Bragg, he's a bit different from the usual Autumn Store fayre, and the bill feels all the better for his hugely entertaining turn.

The Deirdres from Derby are huge in number and young of age, and there's too much going on at any one time to take all of it in at first. They start the show with their backs turned to the audience and have their own dance routine before revealing that they're all in character by wearing a pair of big Deirdre specs either on their face, their head or coquettishly tucked into their blouses. There are obvious comparisons to Los Campesinos! and another fashionable twist sees the group swap instruments and vocal turns with dizzying regularity.

Which is all very well, but does it all work? By and large, yes, aside from a slight glitch with that most evil of instruments, the recorder (the distant memories of disinfectant taste and clumsy fingers still bedevil your haunted hack), these precocious upstarts reveal talent, invention and more than decent songwriting skills. One suspects it may have taken years of practice and preparation for them to be this gauche and yet so good and so fun. The Deirdres, then: not a Barlow par performance between them.

Curious to see these acts for yourself? All three will be performing at the Indietracks festival in July in The Deirdres' home county of Derbyshire.

Parsons Knows

Andy Parsons, Shrewsbury Music Hall, Shrewsbury, Sunday September 16 2007, 8pm.

Being a comedian is hard work, so Dead Kenny took the day off and went to see Andy Parsons live at The Music Hall, in the company of Gisbourne and Neal. Parsons is the balding guy with a high-pitched southern accent who's a regular on late-night comedy panel show Mock The Week and he's a professional comedian for the very good reason he's rather effective at making people laugh.

Reviewing comedy gigs is not a Parallax View forte also for a good reason - we're usually too busy careering from chuckling to chortling to take down notes of which gags worked or didn't, and your crap correspondent can never remember jokes at the best of times, unless they've been directly aimed at his friends. And while Parsons gets mucho mileage from the front row (a lady in a woollen beret with unfortunate toilet timing, a crisp-chombling chap and a fat bloke called Fred and his teacher wife coming in for particular attention) as well as singling out the bloke behind us who shouted 'Woo!' at the beginning, my companions for the night survived unscathed.

So as we can't remember specific gags you'll have to take your hoho-ing hack's word for it that Parsons represents good value-for-money in terms of solid quickfire material that, while remaining topical, should appeal to a broad audience range. Gordon Brown and David Cameron came in for roughly equal amounts of stick with defensive teachers ('I've got marking, you know!') and the good folk of Telford (always goes down well in Shrewsbury!) also heavily targeted. Unlike the likes of Richard Herring though, there were no surreal elements as such in the material so your concluding correspondent will contribute by saying that throughout he laughed like a train.

Why Make A Simpsons Movie? D'Ough!

The Simpsons Movie, Odeon Telford, Sunday August 19 2007, 8.15pm.

First off, let's make it clear your cool-on-cartoons correspondent is no Simpsons obsessive. Have laughed along to many a show, and would generally concur it's one of the landmark programmes of our era, but when pubtalk moves to matching gags to particular episodes your huffy hack will quickly look to shift it back to music, football or girls. Yet in what seems a weak summer season, The Simpsons Movie appeared to offer the most palatable blend of brainfood and pop(culture)corn on the multiplex menu.

Belly-laughs start early with an inspired Itchy and Scratchy toon that sets the tone for a satisfying stirfry of slapstick and subversion, although the laugh-o-meter settles down to a steady stream of chucklesome moments without quite ever spilling over into wet-your-pants hilarity. The storyline quite comfortably reaches the running time without feeling like an over-long episode but there's a softer centre to proceedings than usual and a slight tendency to sentimentality probably explained by the need to pander to a broader audience taste than normal.

Most disappointing, perhaps, is that the linear plotline doesn't allow for meatier subplots concerning the fantastic range of supporting characters that have built up over the series. Having typed that, the Simpson movie of my dreams, that would owe as much to Altman and Pynchon than Hanna and Barbera in its holistic and hilarious debunking of a corrupt age, would never get made, let alone released, despite the potential hinted at during some of the best episodes over the years. And so, we're left with the best Simpsons movie we could hope for that would also earn over 100 million bucks at the box office, a pretty good way to spend 90 minutes without ever approaching the greatness of landmark cinematic toons like Toy Story or The Incredibles.

Clever Dick

Richard Herring, Menage A Un, Oakengates Theatre, Telford, Thursday June 7 2007, 8pm.

Richard Herring used to be one half of a successful comedy double act with Stewart Lee in the 90s, but your correspondent didn't have much time for him then, due to an irrational hatred of his bequiffed sparring partner. Times have been leaner than his midriff for Herring since, although have warmed to him thanks to the chucklesome Sunday papers reviews he contributed to Andrew Collins' much missed 6Music show, so decide to pop along when he's decent enough to do a show in town.

Herring comes on and off stage to the strains of The Go! Team. The first half of his performance is mainly quickfire jokes, albeit with some running elements within, with Maxine C@rr and the fair borough of Telford being the most consistent butts for his comical disdain. An elderly couple in the front row are 'treated' to lurid accusations about the arid nature of their lovelife while two lovelies a further row back are regularly leered at with references to their vaginas, although to be fair they seemed quite chuffed with the attention. His persistence with these two might suggest that the comedian had taken one two many shots of 'theatrical viagra' before bounding on stage, and if so, would that be called a Herring Boner? Which just goes to show why Richard's up there being paid for telling gags on stage while your trusty hack is tapping away at his keyboard with no rhyme or AdSense.

During the interval, Herring's sitcom pilot 'You Can Choose Your Friends' is being aired on ITV1. Didn't catch any of it personally, apparently his bottom fell out if you like that sort of thing, hopefully they'll commission a series of it and your correspondent can catch up with it (the programme, not his bottom, you understand).

The second half of the performance features longer sections which split the audience somewhat. A joke about some old people on a fire feeling the cold extends into a dialogue between the left and right profiles of the characters involved, which goes on for so long that even Herring at points seems to lose track of which side he's on. Every time you think he takes a sketch as far as he can he bursts in with another lurch into lunacy with either frustrating or hilarious results, depending on your viewpoint. While this isn't to everyone's tastes, the subtle shifts from the more obvious gag material into existential territory is very clever indeed.

So that was Richard Herring, then. He was very funny and Dead Kenny laughed a lot. His comic alter-ego as a priapic slob with a bitterness and quiet desperation creeping into his otherwise eager-to-please persona and an ongoing envy towards his better-looking more successful rival may well sail pretty close to the truth, but that element of pathos probably spices up his set just as much as the monkey semen. But for Richard's own views on the evening please take a look here.