THERE is nothing more depressing than a "good time band", and Eastbourne's Toploader have all the forced jollification of that Royal It's A Knockout farce or mass-consumption bottled beer.
The 1.5 million-selling success of 2000's debut album, Onka's Big Moka, has prompted corkscrew-haired Joseph Washbourn and his blokey colleagues to swap the pensioner paradise of Britain's South Coast for musical plastic surgery on America's forever young West Coast.
There they stayed in the Magic Hotel in Los Angeles while recording their inexorably jaunty songs, written on Van Morrison's old piano, in the studio used by the Beach Boys for Pet Sounds. Toploader now overstretch themselves in striving to outdo office-party anthem Dancing In The Moonlight, especially on the string-cosseted Midas Touch and sentimental Lady Let Me Shine. Magic Hotel's anodyne Motown soul, Sixties British blues and annoying transatlantic vocals are cheery but cheerless: the sound of Level 42 covering the Counting Crows.
Toploader play York Barbican Centre on November 2. Box office: 01904 656688.
Updated: 09:54 Thursday, August 29, 2002
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