A grand guignol parody of pop

I thought the bad old days of hype had ended with The Big Geraniums and An Emotional Fish, but I was wrong. For the past six months, Polygram Ireland has been touting Juniper as "the most explosive Irish band of 1998", and telling us that this Celbridge band will be "huge". Juniper's debut single, a damp ditty called Weatherman, went to number nine in the Irish charts, no small thanks, surely, to an aggressive marketing campaign which saw posters of the band on every available inch of billboard space, and lots of airplay.

I checked out this "explosive" band at the Olympia Theatre last Saturday night, and my faith in rock 'n' roll was shaken to its very core. Imagine a twisted, nightmarish version of rock, with all its elements grossly distended and exaggerated. If Juniper were merely mediocre, that would have been somewhat bearable, but this band are so enormously, over-the-top awful as to be deeply disturbing. At the end of this abhorrent assault on my taste and sensibilities, I seriously doubted if I could ever enjoy the pure delights of pop music ever again.

Juniper's complete lack of good songs doesn't stop them from dragging out each number into a monstrous, overblown epic, and their only half-decent song, Eskimo, is destroyed by a grand guignol delivery which would make even the cheesiest poodle-rock band wince in embarrassment. You'd have to travel to farflung suburbs of Norway or Germany circa 1981 to see such a howling parody of pop.

I have one request for Polygram: please, please desist from sending me Juniper press releases, records concert tickets or free crucifixes. I just want to wipe their horrid sound out of my head and recover my wounded love affair with pop music. Truly, I have seen the worst Irish band ever, and they are called Juniper.