It's a perception compounded by an interview frontman Matt Bowman gave last year, in which he recounted inviting a fan with "really big tits" onstage. "The crowd were loving it, so I poured a bottle of water all over her white T-shirt. You could see her nipples and everything." The band later claimed this was "absolute bollocks" and badly misrepresented their live shows - which, to hear them tell it, are essentially seminars on feminist empowerment.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to say the Pigeon Detectives are without qualities. As Emergency proves, what they do is entirely generic, but it's hard to argue with its melodic efficacy. They know how to structure a song: the choruses of Don't You Wanna Find Out and I'm a Liar click perfectly. Sadly, any arising pleasure is entirely blotted out by the unlistenable ugliness of the lyric.
They have three kinds of song. In the first, chief writer Oli Main feels obliged to take someone down a peg or two, which he does using his reliably devastating "oh-so" technique: "You think you're oh-so clever", or "oh-so petty and so pretentious".
The second is the spiteful break-up song, in which the Pigeon Detectives pour scorn on a recently-chucked female with a boorish sneer that beguilingly combines immense self-regard with mind-boggling witlessness: it's like being dumped by Chris Moyles. "I could love you for a day but then I'd hate you for a week," opens Love You For a Day. "If there was something you could say I'd tell you what to speak." The latter line is delivered with a note of triumph, as indeed it might be: after all, what can you speak to a put-down like that?
The third and most remarkable is the song in which Bowman offers a fortunate lady the chance to sleep with him. Lest she get the wrong idea about the degree of commitment involved (perhaps she's seen him onstage, tirelessly advocating women's rights with the aid of some Evian and a mammiferous female, and come to the conclusion that such a sensitive and thoughtful gentleman will make the perfect Life Partner), he emphasises that his favours will be dispensed on a strictly one-off, no-strings basis: "When the sun comes up, there will be nothing wrong, because I will be away from you." You can't accuse him of luring them under false pretences, but nevertheless, his patter may need a tweak. "Although I don't know your name, I will love you just the same for tonight." he advises elsewhere. "Like a flash in your pan, I will take what I can." You quail at criticising one so silver-tongued, but it does seem inadvisable to try and to win a potential conquest by comparing your boudoir technique to a flash in the pan, which according to my dictionary means "promising start followed by failure".
Elsewhere, there isn't much musical progression on offer, unless you count Nothing to Do With You, which features a mandolin sound similar to that on the Smiths' Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want. You can see why they've done this - placing the band in illustrious northern lineage and so on - but reminding the listener of vintage Morrissey and Marr midway through Emergency seems needlessly cruel, like reading out the menu from Alain Ducasse's Plaza Athénée restaurant to someone eating a Ginster's Scotch Egg Bar.
As Emergency draws to its sophisticated conclusion - the last thing you hear are the words "bell-end" - you're left pondering a deeply unlikely scenario. Unshakably convinced of its irresistible charm and quick-witted genius while giving every outward impression of being both obnoxious and as thick as two short planks, Emergency is the album the Arctic Monkeys might have made if they fired Alex Turner and replaced him with Michael off The Apprentice. What a horrible thought. What a horrible album.
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