Best gig of the week: the fuzzy, slacker melodies of teenage quintet Disq

Come January, when the proper pop stars are all in the gym working off the pounds before they emerge, blinking and svelte, into the watery winter sun, the small venues of London attempt to pack in the curious by filling their schedules with seasons of up-and-coming artists. In east London this past week, the excellent promoter Eat Your Own Ears ran three free nights of new acts. In Islington, the Lexington offered first the Winter Sprinter — five nights of sweet-toothed indie pop, where you might have caught the Portland Brothers, the occasional duo featuring Steven Adams, once of the Broken Family Band, and the best songwriter almost no one in the country has heard of — and then the Five Day Forecast, in conjunction with the new music website the Line of Best Fit.

Not all 15 artists from across the week are going to have their moment in the sun. But I suspect the world will hear more at some point from Alfie Templeman. It’s not that he was brilliant — he was not; he was perfectly fine — but he appeared to be wholly uninterested in anything other than making people happy. He’s 16 years old (though he could pass for 17, at a push) and pretty in that second-best-looking-boy-in-the-form way, and his music fizzed with brightness, all sunny, chiming guitars, and falsetto harmonies from his bass player. The drawbacks? Sturdy though the songs were, they did exactly what one expected them to do, and his voice had that thin whininess that’s meant to sound sensitive but filled me with the urge to shout at him to enunciate properly.

Much more interesting (and much less likely to be played on daytime radio) was Sinead O’Brien, who rather invited comparisons to the young Patti Smith by being a poet reciting over the top of electric guitar and drums.