The Strokes, Brixton Academy, London

When hype takes its toll

You might have assumed that, after last year's ridiculous feeding-frenzy, we'd all have calmed down about the Strokes by now. Well, shame on you for your naivety! One punter informs me that tickets for their Brixton show are swapping hands for up to £250. For anyone daft enough to have paid such a price, that's nearly 20 quid a song. Could the New York quintet possibly be worth it? Going on tonight's evidence, the answer is, no.

Sure, the Strokes are cute enough, give or take a few pimples. They write efficiently exuberant punk-pop songs, and come with a singer with the kind of penetratingly deep vocals that make you come over all unnecessary. So what if they got all their ideas from Lou Reed and Richard Hell? As Oasis have proved before them, there's no harm in being derivative if you want to get ahead in pop music.

What remains a mystery is how these five New Yorkers have prompted the levels of devotion witnessed over the past year. Tonight, they sleep-walk through a 50-minute set largely made up of songs from their ecstatically received album, Is This It. They are touted as bad-boy rock stars, the answer to our prayers in a time of over-sensitive singer-songwriter types, but there's precious little personality on show here.

You can only imagine that the hype has final taken its toll on Julian Casablancas and Co. Either that, or they just don't need to make the effort anymore. Playing in front of a crowd that screams itself silly at every light-change is bound to make a band a little complacent. Given that they have only an album's worth of material, tracks that this audience could recite backwards, they can get away with churning them out without any of the passion and dynamism that presumably led them to write the songs in the first place.

Matters aren't helped by the fact that the Strokes are playing a venue too big for their sound. The sweaty intimacy of their songs is instantly lost, their propulsive force extinguished. Perhaps I'm making excuses for them, but any band declared by the music press as the future of rock'n'roll has to be doomed. Remember Gay Dad, hailed as the great white hopes of music three years ago? That was before they vanished into obscurity.

A bad gig could be the best thing to happen to the Strokes. A period of calm would at least allow them to come back down to earth, and perhaps even start enjoying themselves. Then they might be left alone to get on with the business of being promising young musicians.