Kitty, Daisy and Lewis - Kitty, Daisy and Lewis

Welcome to the fifties with Kitty, Daisy and Lewis! It’s not only the name of the band, the dresses of the girls, the album cover which displays black & white pictures of what looks like a vintage studio; the three-piece sound exactly like a Memphis band at the time when the King was not dead.

They are, in a way, excellent counterfeiters. When they cover a vintage tune it’s forgotten enough not to sound like a cover, and their own material is exactly like the rest – anything but new. It’s all sunny and hip-swinging, full of ukulele, banjo and harmonica. Their greatest capital is certainly the voice of the female singer, xeroxing perfectly the husked and bluesy tone of late great female vocalists.

Nevertheless this music won’t make you cry nor shiver as true rockabilly should. It’s not that easy to import Memphis Sun studios into the fog of London. Despite the truly hawaiian mottos of ‘Honolulu Rock-a Roll-a’ or all the fun of ‘Polly Put The Kettle On’, it remains slightly distant, prude, cold – slightly too English, perhaps. It’s always finger-clicking, but also too polite, as if Kitty, Daisy and Lewis did not dare to make a sound that might give away their quality of 1990s-born Britons.

However, their inability to hide their belonging to our time is a felicitous failure. If they did sound exactly like a 50s act, they would raise little more interest than a cover band. But their ‘Hillbilly Music’ recalls the Libertines more than Woodie Guthrie, and that’s not bad. It’s even encouraging: this debut album proves that they are cultivated and good multi-instrumentalists, but also that they may, in the future, be able to use the fifties revival as a springboard to produce something novel.