Hunx And His Punx - Too Young To Be In Love

On the surface Hunx And His Punx appears to be a gimmick. Is it Grease in drag? John Waters or Phil Spector? But really ‘Too Young To Be In Love’, the first album proper from Hunx (AKA Seth Bogart), is more nostalgia than novelty. It’s the Shangri-Las lovingly repackaged as gay garage.

Despite all of his wonderfully over the top outfits and trashy videos, Bogart’s music remains perfectly restrained. You can almost imagine a teenage girl dancing around her room and dreaming about boys to this album in the 1960s, even though it’s made by a man from Oakland dressed in leather and a zebra-print thong.

Credit has to go to his Punx and Punkettes, who do an excellent job reproducing the classic girl group sound with a slight garage edge and supplying plenty of sing-a-long harmonies and choruses. It’s refreshing to hear a band playing music that sounds like the influences they clearly love, rather than just ripping them off and giving them a modern twist like so many others do.

Hunx brings the humour, innuendo and sleaze, but there are real feelings in his lyrics as he unleashes his inner lovesick teenager, and that’s what makes these songs so endearing. We all know falling in love and having your heart broken hurts, but it’s a lot more fun dancing to rock ’n’ roll and singing about those experiences.