[Punk] Live: Mad Caddies & Throw Rag - Garage, Glasgow, 27.10.04

**Live: Mad Caddies & Throw Rag - Garage, Glasgow, 27.10.04**

[image=left]http://www.alternativenation.net/photos/data/913/5004en410192cbn_madcaddies_576anw-thumb.jpg[/image]
Ska is dead. Ska sucks. Ska’s over. Chequered pants are so not cool any more. I wonder how it feels to be in one of the world’s most successful modern ska bands then? The Mad Caddies started off in the mid-nineties in California, under the name Ivy League, and post name-change they produced one of the finest albums to come out of the third-wave ska revival which gripped America’s alterna-teens at the tail-end of that decade.

Quality Soft Core packed more ideas, genres and melodies into each song than most bands of the time spread across a whole album. From there, the Mad Caddies mellowed a little, slowed down a little, and quietly took over the world through incessant touring. Once they broke out of America, they seemed to be constantly on the road around Europe, at one point playing Glasgow three times in the space of two months – at a time when most American punk/ska bands were still only dipping a tenatative toe into the Atlantic before crying off with an excuse of it being too cold.

The Mad Caddies built a solid reputation for being a great party band. Their live show was known for it's energy, hilarity, and simple-minded fun. A Mad Caddies gig ticket was a guarantee of good times ahead.

The music scene which spawned them has withered and died, their contemporaries have reverted to staying home in the States, yet still the Mad Caddies hit the road with ridiculous regularity. The question is... have they still got it? Are they still fun?

Well... yes and no. Yes, their horn section has riffs which most guitar bands would kill for. Yes, they can punk it up ith the best of ’em. Yes, they make you laugh. Yes, they make you dance. It's not all good news though – the newer songs are instantly forgettable, a fact driven home each time they pull an older track out of the bag. Goleta was a sublime slice of danceable downtempo ragga, building to a guitar-spiked crescendo... but it served only to highlight how bland the newer songs either side of it really were.

The drunken dancing tracks were all present and correct – Monkeys front and centre, driving the crowd wild as always, but the mellower moments fell a little flat. However well respected the ’Caddies may be in the ska scene, they’re still capable of trotting out white-boy cod-reggae which wouldn't be out of place in a UB40 set.

In general though, the set held together perfectly well, with distinctly more highs than lows. The Mad Caddies’ detractors may be right when they call them a one-joke band... but that one joke is an undeniably funny one, and hits the spot every time.

Entertaining though the Mad Caddies my be though, the support band won the day. Not Canadian youngsters Belvedere – their generic buzzsaw pop-punk bored me half to tears. I mean the first act onstage, before half the audience even arrived... Throw Rag hail from the States and are on the roster of BYO Records, but may as well have dropped by from another planet.

With their vocalist in a sailor outfit, flanked by a sharply besuited guitarist and distinctly a grunge-tastic rhythm section, their mysterious ‘fifth man’ still stood out a mile. Like a punk-rock Jack Black, he whooped, hollered, swore and sweated his way through their straight ahead rock‘n’roll set playing washboard, spoons and cowbells. Somehow this actually made a twisted sort of musical sense, and the moments without his accompaniment seemed distinctly lacking.

Throw Rag’s songs were unashamedly based on stolen riffs – a Sex Pistols refrain here, a Ramones melody there... but the songs they built around those foundations were fresh and original, giving nods to garage rock, psychobilly, hair metal, and Elvis himself. Natural performers, all five men had thousand-yard stares to put Rocket From the Crypt to shame, and the twin frontmen stalked the Garage stage like predatory animals, picking off audience members one by one.

Throw Rag managed to make the half-empty Garage feel like a small, sweaty rock‘n’roll dive bar – and I can think of no higher compliment.

The Mad Caddies may well continue to prove themselves deserving survivors of an almmost-dead scene, but Throw Rag looked like punk rock’s next-most-likely from where I was standing.