THE portents were not good. Seating in the Olympia, a pedal steel guitar that looked uncomfortably like a zimmerframe. trousers tucked inside calf length cowboy boots. About the only missing ingredient was straw on the stage for that "authentic" hoedown feel.

Luckily BR5-49 prove a mite livelier than that, and served up a respectable night of showband type shenanigans. With tales of girls called Betty (finer, so we are told, than anything in Hustler magazine), a hearty twang in their step and more rockabilly than Morrissey could shake a stick at, they at least sent their audience home happy.

They are a band with only two types, of song. The full on country dirge that was restlessly, received by at least a section of the crowd, and the more up tempo rockabilly standard which made the audience seem as if they were about to spontaneously line dance in appreciation. Their impact relies in the main on the conventional twin guitars, pedal steel guitar and the obviously overdone Southern drawl, but, the band were by far the most effective when they eschewed the pedal steel for lively fiddle melodies. On these, unfortunately few, occasions BR5-49 came preciously close to what Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli would have sounded like if they came from Austen, Texas and said "howdy".

In the main, however, they are not a band overly gifted with originality, and over the course of a whole evening the general effect becomes quite wearisome. The songs are a little too one paced, the walking bass a little too uninventive and the lack of variety leads to a feeling that the songs display a sort of musical in breeding where everything sounds slightly too similar.