Academy, Dublin
They don’t make ’em like the New York Dolls anymore – the health and safety people wouldn’t permit it. Glammed-up, sexed-up, jacked-up and looking for action, the Dolls were the original bad boys dressed up like bad girls, who kick-started punk with a flick of their stilettos.
If there was a World’s Most F***ed Up Band category, the Dolls would have won it hands down, so it’s incredible to see the last two alive strutting onstage at the Academy, still brimming with attitude, and still kicking out the jams nearly 40 years after their first gig.
I remember my long-distance love affair with the Dolls, staring at pictures of these pretty boys in the NME and waiting in vain to hear their tunes on the radio. But the Dolls were destined to crash and burn in drug- and drink-fuelled tragedy, and such classics as Personality Crisis, Trashand Who Are The Mystery Girlswere doomed to never darken the Top 10. They've lost Billy Murcia, Jerry Nolan, Arthur Kane and Johnny Thunders over the years, but David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain are still rocking, although they're going easy on the lipstick and hair-spray these days.
Thank the Dolls' biggest fan, Morrissey, for bringing them back out of their closet – he urged them to reform in 2004 when he curated the Meltdown festival. Since then, the Dolls have relished their second bite of the cherry, releasing two studio albums packed with good-time trashy rock 'n' roll anthems such as We're All In Love, Nobody Got No Bizness, Gotta Get Awayfrom Tommy and Dance Like A Monkey. All of these got wrung out to dry at the band's Academy gig, along with such balls-out chestnuts as Looking For A Kiss, Pills, Trashand Jet Boy.
Johansen and Sylvain have recruited young guns Steve Conte on guitar, Sami Yaffa on bass and Brian Delaney on drums; this line-up has now been going longer than the original band. It's dirty, stripped-down rock 'n' roll with its mascara running and its hair in a mess – perhaps a bit unseemly for men of their age, but that's part of the appeal of the new NY Dolls. It takes a particular talent to pull off that lurching, loose-hipped style, and the Dolls learned from the best – The Stones, The Stooges and the MC5. They've also influenced a whole generation of greats, so why the Academy isn't packed to the rafters is a mystery – don't people realise that without the New York Dolls, we may not have had Kiss, Blondie, The Clash, The Ramones, Guns N'Roses, The Sex Pistols or even The Smiths? In homage to fallen compadre Johnny Thunders, the Dolls did You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memoryand Lonely Planet Boyback to back, and the encore was – what else? – Personality Crisis. Thanks, Morrissey – we owe you one.
