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It’s exciting when as a fan and writer alike you can drop the journalistic and cynical façade and let go at a music show, allowing yourself to be drowned in the waves of genuinely great pop songs that are flooded your way. A band who needn’t try hard, yet wonderfully do, is Good Shoes, south London’s indie rockers who have more melody in their tunes than pretty much every other new band in the UK.

Their Cure-esque tracks such as ‘Never Meant To Hurt You’ and the irrevocably infectious ‘Small Town Girl’ are better live than you could ever hope they would be, the sweeping guitars and beyond harmonious vocals gelling into a jumble of new wave power pop that rivals any other band who have played London’s Astoria in recent months. “This is the biggest headline show we’ve played”, songwriter Rhys enthusiastically settled before heading off on stage to deliver a set which bastioned the best of his lyrics over riffs so energetically dynamic they should have come in kit form with a hefty construction manual.

The highlight of the show was undeniably its climax, the hand-clapping ethos of ‘Morden’, a song so justifiable to anybody who has lived wherever they didn’t want to, the escapist assail on their home town transcending to almost any twenty-something with a lust for what’s beyond the end of the high street. “I think people can relate to that song in pretty much every town you go to”, remarks Rhys to the riotous sound of a restless crowd downstairs in the commandingly sized venue. Not that the band had any cause to be anxious as the crowd, mainly London-ites who too can share the philosophy of the subject matter Good Shoes sing about, were more than sympathetic to their music. Also, this band have played so much in 2007 that it would take in excess of a few thousand screaming fans to put them off the task at hand, the band telling us, “every crowd has been great, it’s exciting to find new people out there to connect with and it never gets old”.