ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ

"Is anyone here looking for love?" asks Matthew Murphy, mischievous front man of The Wombats. Unsurprisingly, the response is lukewarm.

The crowd mutter and shuffle, and The Wombats - a trio of recent graduates from Liverpool's Institute Of Performing Arts - are forced to abandon conversation, and roll straight into their next song.

It's not that tonight's crowd is a tough one. It's just that, when you go to a Wombats' gig, sombre emotional probes are the last thing you'd expect.

Fun image

For The Wombats is a band with a reputation for one thing: no-strings-attached silliness.

They write songs for happy-go-lucky indie-disco types, always on the look out for a chance to erupt into bouts of manic dancing - songs about bike-shed gropes, countryside raves and girls who throw back drinks "like Oliver Reed on an Irish stag do".

Take latest single, Let's Dance To Joy Division, which tonight pays a strange tribute to the seventies' miseries, by turning the Waterfront into a sea of sweaty bodies, stabbing their arms into the air.

But, unfortunately, not everything in their set brings such high-octane fun, and, halfway through the night, smiles are starting to droop.

Their performance of Little Miss Pipedream is clumsy and unaffecting, consisting mainly of bassist Tord Øverland-Knudsen gurning and ooh-ing like an early evolution prototype.

Postman Pat

And their penultimate song, a rendition of the Postman Pat theme tune sung in Norwegian, feels more like a schoolboy in-joke than a climax to their set.

Luckily for the crowd, a hyperactive sprint through fan-favourite track Backfire At The Disco means tonight's show finishes on a high.

With the band bounding across the stage in power-chord bliss, the crowd is reminded that, when they get it right, The Wombats can be a lot of fun.

It's just a shame that, once the jokes wear thin, there isn't a little more on offer.

The Wombats played The Waterfront, Norwich, on Sunday, 9 November, 2007.