Glamming it up

Late on the Friday afternoon of The Great Escape — the annual three-day event for which the London music industry decamps to Brighton to spend three days drinking and trying to get into tiny venues to see new bands — two very young men stood outside a pub, making quite the impression. One, with bleached blond hair, yellow tinted sunglasses and livid red lipstick, wearing a black string vest, clutched a bottle of Mexican lager. The other, made up with huge rouge smears on his cheeks and heavy eyeshadow, wore a beret, a green faux-military tunic, and — naturally — an Elizabethan-styled ruff. You knew they were in a band; you could tell from their armbands, which bore the legend HMLTD.

Three hours later, HMLTD — changed last year from Happy Meal Ltd as it became apparent that McDonald’s lawyers might take an unusually close interest in their career — took to the stage at The Haunt, and for 40 minutes or so offered a thrilling, immersive performance, as if David Bowie had cloned himself in 1972 and sent five duplicates (and a keyboard player who looked like Will from The Inbetweeners) forward in time. There is a sense of frenzy around their shows at the moment that is unmatched anywhere else. They leave one agog, even if one doesn’t yet come away whistling hit after hit.

HMLTD are one of a group of young bands who are explicitly indebted to glam rock. It’s not that they sound much like glam — they are more like some musical mutation that crosses Nick Cave’s old band the Birthday Party with the new romantics — but they could not have existed without it. Like Bowie, they are a walking advert for and encouragement to self-expression, a cabaret of twisted sexuality.