Dumb and dumber

Frank Sinatra once said that rock 'n' roll is music "sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons; and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd - in plain fact, dirty lyrics - it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth". Man, he would have just LOVED The Datsuns and The Hellacopters at the Wolverhampton Wulfrun Hall on Friday.

Like a worryingly large proportion of bands around at the moment, The Hellacopters seem to have appointed ZZ Top as their style gurus. In musical terms, they resemble Guns 'N' Roses - if getting rubbed down in diesel oil had been their next move after Appetite For Destruction, instead of all the pomposity and pretension of the Use Your Illusions double album. That they're very hairy goes without saying.

The Datsuns followed - an exceedingly tight-trousered Kiss if they'd had a brief hot 'n' sticky dalliance with punk. The fiddly solos, the complete lack of irony, Dolf de Datsun's remarkable duck-bill lips - it's all so WRONG. But then 'In Love' or the chorus to 'Super Gyration' smacks you repeatedly round the head and you start to feel the dumbness spreading downwards to your extremities until you, like everyone else in the room, are a dead-eyed zombie chanting such nonsensical mantras as "Harmonic generator, intermodulator!" like some kind of braindead Hare Krishna.

Anyway, I quite like being a sideburned delinquent.