les incompetents - End Of An Error (2004 - 2006) Album Review

les incompetents
End Of An Error (2004 - 2006), Album Review

Once upon a time a group of lads decided to enter their school's battle-of-the-bands competition. Only problem was, they didn't have a band.and so Les Incompetents were born!

Sadly, just two years and two singles later, and after a traumatic six months including the near death of one of the band members, it was all over.

Often ridiculed and lambasted for being "overtly posh" and "musically incompetent", Les Incompetents were one of those bands that actually managed to combine excitement, enthusiasm and a sense of adventure with a plethora of cracking tunes that produced several moments of near-genius, and in a world so po-faced as the one surrounding the music business, felt like a breath of fresh air.

'End Of An Error' documents their career, and anyone who got the chance to see them live will recognise everything on here almost immediately. You see, that was one of the great things about Les Incompetents - love 'em or hate 'em, once heard, you never forgot 'em.

Based around the (mostly) improvised vocal interplay of duel singers Freddie Bang! (nee MacPherson) and Billy Bell (aka Leeson), Les Incompetents also managed to get through more drummers than Spinal Tap in their short history but still managed to unleash one of the most imaginative and criminally overlooked single releases of 2006, the gorgeously frantic 'How It All Went Wrong', which apart from sounding like a gunfight between the Pogues, Orange Juice and The Coral on Hampstead Heath, also fittingly became their epitaph.

Other highlights include the 90 second long opener 'Ramshackle Riot Show', (preceded by a spoken word intro from one David Walliams here), the Franz Ferdinand after two many uppers 'Reunion' and also the Fisher Price techno of 'Chapter Two', which has a certain behind-the-bikesheds-at-lunchtime charm about it that no one since Pop Will Eat Itself nearly two decades ago has managed to achieve so admirably (and cheekily) since.

Elsewhere there is an interview with John Kennedy for XFM which naturally turns into a shambolic outburst of four-letter tinged mayhem, while their cover of 'Whiskey In The Jar' sounds truer to its Irish folksong origins than the Thin Lizzy version that most people associate with the song.

But that, of course, was the whole point of Les Incompetents: Predictably unpredictable and all the more lovable for it.

Gone, but definitely not forgotten.

4.5/5

Dom Gourlay