Why garage punk is plainly the apogee of human achievement

How is it that a group that sounds like the Hives are selling out the Apollo? In a world configured according to expectation, the highlight of their year would be an appearance at the Rebellion punk festival in Blackpool, probably high up the bill on the second stage. They’d headline their own shows at places like the Dome in Tufnell Park to an audience made up of three-quarters old blokes and a quarter skinny young kids, suited and booted like it’s 1966 and Antonioni’s about to shout ‘Action!’. Afterwards, a DJ would play the Sonics and the Electric Prunes and the Chocolate Watchband.

The Hives are a garage punk band, who owe a debt to the forgotten 1960s singles compiled on albums named after rock forms: Nuggets, Boulders, Pebbles, Rubble. Garage punk tends to be of niche interest, despite the music plainly being the apogee of human achievement, a primitive splurge of inchoate fear and excitement and rage and joy. Cheerful mayhem in 150-second doses. Honestly, it’s only the hope that someone, somewhere might record a track as exciting as the Electras’ 1967 single ‘Action Woman’ that keeps me going.

What the Hives shouldn’t be doing is selling 5,000 tickets for a Saturday night gig in London. And the tickets downstairs shouldn’t have been sold, seemingly in their entirety to a bunch of kids, who in turn shouldn’t be going absolutely bonkers for it all. Not after 30 years of basically doing the same thing over and over again (yes, there are always the claims that this album is a bit different – look! Here’s the one where Pharrell Williams did some production! – but then again, if Tyson Fury were to punch me with his left, then his right hand, I don’t think I’d know the difference: I suspect I’d just feel like I’d twice been smashed into next week).