Get Some Saturday Night Beaver

I’m beginning to think that it’s pretty much impossible to have a bad night at the Bethnal Green Workingmen’s Club. Everything is the right side of quirky, and although the events are unfailingly bizarre, the atmosphere is never aloof.

Saturday Night Beaver (let’s get the playground giggles out of the way this instant), is a wonderfully cheery night of ’50s and ’60s-inspired fun, undercut by the throb of punkrock. Populated with a mixed crowd of all ages, ranging from detail-perfect throwbacks to your average curious London drinker, the stage decked with an illuminated heart, and emitting its signature odour from the candy-striped popcorn machine, the Workingmen’s Club looked its time-warp best last Saturday.

The first band on stage were the marvellously tongue-in-cheek Sundae Kups. A twee Californian three-piece dressed in white fast food service uniforms, they played a string of metronomically precise surf instrumental covers, including the oft overlooked masterpiece that is the theme tune to The Munsters.

Next up with a vastly contrasting sound were Methodist Centre, whose punk line-up consisted of two drummers leaping from their seats to berate their microphones, leaving a lone guitarist to shuffle about on the square of stage not dominated by drum kits. This shouldn’t have worked so well, but it did, and the boisterous set ended in the apt splitting of a drum skin.

The Fabulous Penetrators, who were the headline act and the organisers of this genius soirée, launched a charm offensive that got everyone on their feet within the first few bars of loud rock ‘n’ roll. Sporting a prodigious pair of false lashes, the singer loafed around the stage like a Las Vegan, spraying a bit of Newcastle Brown into the unsuspecting front row for good measure.

The band had cunningly roped in the aesthetic services of The Laundrettas (a gang of dress-up Hackney girls) to sell 45s of their new single, which they did with no small amount of gusto while dressed as beavers and waving plastic saws.

All in all, it was a nostalgia-fest of eccentric glamour and bouncy, danceable tunes, from rock ‘n’ roll to calypso and punk, and not a cynic in sight. Nothing short of great.

The next Saturday Night Beaver ushers in 2009 at the Lexington in Angel on January 31st, and The Fabulous Penetrators play The Marlborough in Camberwell this Friday.

Bethnal Green Workingmen’s Club
44-46 Pollard Row
Bethnal Green
E2 6NB

Tel: 020 7739 7170

The Lexington
66-68 Pentonville Road
N1 9HS

Tel: 0871 984 3553

The Marlborough
67 Sedgemoor Place
Camberwell
SE5 7SE

Tel: 020 77032703