The Bishops The Bishops by: Geoff Lemon Mon:10-Sep-07 Label: 1234 Year: 2007 WB rating 45 out of 100

A brief glance at their website or packaging tells you that British trio The Bishops are very conscious of their nation’s musical past, and are using it to project a highly specific image. Every available photo of them is taken in a stylised manner mimicking band photography of the 1960s and ‘70s. The lads are usually snapped in black and white, wearing sharpish suits, in some kind of gritty urbanised British setting. Even their hair is carefully Beatled. The promo album photo has been filtered to look like an old newspaper shot, the release album photo looks like it was shot in a 1964 BBC studio and the singles are decorated with retro ink-drawn artwork.

It comes as no real surprise then, that The Bishops’ debut album is similarly tied up in heritage-listed British rock n’ roll; rock n’ roll of the original kind – simple jaunty constructions, boyish energy, and what seem today to be very innocent and clean lyrics. Spotting The Bishop’s musical influences is about as hard as spotting an elephant in the boot of your car. The ‘60s flavour of early Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers is most prevalent, but temporally speaking The Bishops stretch a little in either direction, down to fresh-faced ‘50’s pop, and up to the somewhat harder ‘70s edge of The Who, The Animals and The Clash.

While this is by no means a bad range of acts to list as influences, The Bishops don’t manage to achieve much from this starting point. Initially the notion of a band being so thoroughly retro was intriguing, and raised hopes that something interesting would stem from it. But in fairly short time, it became clear that The Bishops’ songs are as closely mimicked as their photos. Certainly, there’s a slightly fuzzier edge to the guitar and a slightly harder beat than some of the early falsetto-heavy Beatles work, but the difference is slight indeed. In all honesty, if you’d told me this album was released in 1966, I would have believed it, and regarded it as the work of one of the thousands of wannabe Beatles clones that roamed the countryside at the time, disturbing villagers and plundering crops, until the British government released a specially designed virus that killed them all around the end of the decade.

The songs themselves are well constructed and tight, granted. They make quite good listening, as long as you’re not listening too hard. The band might even be fun playing live, given their abundance of beats you can bop to. But essentially, the songs are not interesting if you’re more than half-listening. There is nothing incisive, innovative, or even particularly memorable about them and the lyrics are as trite and dully simplistic as any written by ‘60s pop writers. What The Bishops call “classic song craft” could also be classed as outdated pop formula. The vital distinction between being influenced and being derivative is one which they have failed to grasp.

What makes this more aggravating than it might have been is the specious and self-congratulatory copy on the band’s website and promo material. Aside from telling us that the band is “emanating from London” (they must have very loud amps) the site claims they are “drawing upon a range of classic influences whilst still creating something new, original and exciting.” Yet this is exactly what The Bishops have so thoroughly failed to do. Every promotional poster for the album contains in blaringly huge letters the quote “Surely one of the most significant albums of 2007”. Not attributed to any reviewer, this is apparently the opinion of the band themselves. You can only pull off this sort of arrogance if you are in fact very, very good – Muhammad Ali could do it, but two Londoners in suits and a skinny Scotsman don’t make Muhammad Ali.

Ok, it’s not entirely doom and gloom. This is an enjoyable album, but only in a very superficial sense. The songs have a kind of nostalgic charm, but The Bishops have taken the form nowhere from where it was 40 years ago, nor would they have been among the best back in that era. Toe-tapping, yes; likeable, yes; “A collection of songs that are refreshingly striking and different”? Only if they could time travel back to 1959.