Keith Top Of The Pops - Fuck You! I’m Keith Top Of The Pops

It is the morning after the night before. Keith Top Of The Pops, minor UK indie celebrity, wakes up with a mouth like an ashtray, a pounding headache and a stomach as toxic as an Ed Sheeran performance. Shakily getting to his feet, he surveys his surroundings: a recording set up of guitars, drums, mics; sheets and sheets of angry, scrawled lyrics; a cavalcade of passed-out friends from the world of indie including We Are Scientists and half of Art Brut; and, on the mixing desk outside, a copy of ‘Fuck You! I’m Keith Top Of The Pops’.

An album which does sound like it could have been recorded under these entirely fictional circumstances (our lawyers advise us this level of conjecture is probably okay). A record that is loud and brash without belonging to a recognisable genre, and falls foul of the uniformly muddy production. The songs themselves gob venom at targets of varying worthiness, all delivered in the sort of sneering arrogance afforded by Dutch courage.

Keith TOTP comes off as a very angry man throughout (a Stella drinker, perhaps?). From the album artwork itself (aping Johnny Cash’s famous one finger salute photo from his San Quentin performance) through to lyrics that tackle annoyances of various scope, from exs and irritating friends (‘Girl’ and ‘Go Away’, respectively) to land-fill indie (on ‘I Hate Your Band’), there’s very little that escapes Keith’s not-especially-discerning sights.

As mentioned earlier, not all of these targets seem deserving of such vitriol. Similarly to the knowingly ignorant ‘Two Of The Beatles Are Dead’, the naming of names in ‘I Hate Your Band’ (where the likes of talent-vacuums such as Razorlight and The Ting Tings are, bizarrely, mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Bloc Party and The Maccabees) seems to be done simply to court some sort of low-level controversy only the most devout NME readers will really care about.

There’s a lot of arrogance featured throughout ‘Fuck You!…’ and none of it seems particularly deserved. Lyrically and sonically the record seems to go for Art Brut-style charming sloppiness (even copping Eddie Argos’ penchant for vocally introducing guitar solos), but only really gets as far as the second part of that goal.

As far as good albums go… this isn’t one.