The landscape of British rock is routinely pockmarked with journeyman provincial bands who have overcome critical indifference or downright hostility to slog their way to arena-filling status. Scorned by the taste-making elite, they have surfed a populist wave to success, powered by robust tunes, elbow grease and naked bloody-mindedness: Stereophonics. Kasabian. Biffy Clyro. The Courteeners. Catfish and the Bottlemen.
You Me at Six can be firmly added to their number. With negligible media support or endorsement, the hard-rock Surrey five-piece have chucked out five commercially successful albums, including a No 1 in 2014’s Cavalier Youth, and ascended to a rarefied stratosphere where they are able to record live albums at Wembley Arena. They have done so without boasting an original bone in their bodies or any distinguishing musical features whatsoever.
Such success does not roll around by happenstance, and to You Me at Six’s dubious credit they have made an impressively efficient fist of being an utterly generic, entirely unremarkable arena-rock band. Should you desire seeing an utterly generic, entirely unremarkable arena-rock band, they should be your first point of call. In their sturdy set, no heroic pose remains un-thrown; no cliche unsung.
Like many bands of their ilk, they crave depth and profundity while being definitively empty and devoid of significance. Their faux-cathartic confessionals are overwrought and hollow. They must be faking it: how could anybody’s interior monologue truly be this trite and banal?
Their rollicking pop-metal is enjoyable on a pantomime, role-playing level, but you don’t believe a word of it. The clunky, off-the-peg lyrics are there because they need something to fill the quiet bits between their cleverly soaring choruses. Lurid over-writing meets a paucity of imagination: effusions such as Loverboy’s “I beg for attention in small doses / Leave the scene smelling of dead roses” can leave you wincing.
Their tunes are aerodynamic but beneath is all pretend teen-angst and bluster, diligently buffed to a mock-heroic shine. Earnest singer Josh Franceschi puts in a shift, a composite, factory-settings frontman, yet is oddly anonymous and forgettable. His accent ranges from plummy home counties to estuary East End to transatlantic twang: when he unleashes a histrionic howl of “I’m Mr Reckless with a capital R!” on Reckless, you mentally applaud him for keeping a straight face.
With choruses to hang a leather jacket on, You Me at Six are just the type of band that some rock publications pretend to find exciting, yet are precisely as threatening to the status quo as are Coldplay (with whom they share a penchant for great, people-pleasing tunes and terrible lyrics). When an encore of Lived a Lie sees them lined up stage front to chant “We are believers!”, you wonder: in what, exactly? “You look byoodiful, Lunnun!” yells Franceschi. The crowd go absolutely wild and then they go absolutely home.
• At Reading/Leeds festival, 25, 26 August. Tickets: readingfestival.com
