Be Your Own Pet - 'Becky'

So I've just got back from one of my periodic bouts doing scary, grown-up, serious work in another part of the world. By the end of it I felt almost like an adult. But the song that soundtracked more than any other this particular trip? Why, this snotty, teen, girl punk, three minute anthem, of course. My 15 year old inner self remains, it seems. It's only the container that's getting old.

There are a lot of bands around doing short, shameless, guitared-up rock and roll, none of them really doing anything new, but Be Your Own Pet just do it better than anyone else. They offer a perfect combination of wit and stupidity. They do short, dumb songs about partying, fighting and throwing up - and surely we all have those kind of weekends? It's tearing-your-jeans, falling-out-with-your-best-friend-because-you're-drunk, losing-all-sense-of-proportion-because-you're-young-and-you-really-
think-this-is-heartbreak music. It's full of spunk and other cheap bodily fluids, but a girl singer stops it short of being mindlessly macho. And you just know one day this lot are going to grow old and boring and release a difficult LP which demands that we admire their broody musicianship, at which point we truly move from party to hangover, but mercifully, there doesn't seem any sign of that happening yet.

So yes, I love them, even if that makes me feel slightly queasy as my outer container hurtles towards 40 in a undignified way via any number of catastrophes. But if I ever get too old to like this stuff, administer the final, fatal dose.

This is a tune - a tale of vicious, disproportionate and very funny schoolyard revenge, and not a lot of regret either - that saw itself ludicrously excised from American versions of their new LP, Get Awkward. Truly, it's the world that's wrong, not the songs. Over here, in our new joke London city, even though booze is currently being made illegal, of course we lap up anything like this. More, exactly the same, please.