One Day it Will Please Us to Remember Even This
(Roadrunner)



Every junkie rock’n’roller who has ever passed out in a bathtub owes something to the New York Dolls. Fleetingly famous in their original incarnation three decades ago, the band that gave Malcolm McLaren his first break as a manager became a byword for how not to do it.

Their androgynous shabby chic influenced generations of heterosexual make-up wearers from Guns’n’Roses to the Manic Street Preachers. When Steven Morrissey, the former president of the Dolls’ UK fan club, was invited to pick the bill for the Meltdown festival in 2004, the surviving members — the singer David Johansen, Sylvain Sylvain on guitar and the bassist Arthur Kane — reconvened at his request. Kane later succumbed to leukaemia, but the others continued, writing new material and touring again. After a trifling 32-year gap then, here is their third album — and it’s a lot of fun.

The excellent single Gimme Luv and Turn on the Light, a classic garage rock groove that outdoes anything on the recent Primal Scream album, are two highlights. Elsewhere, Rainbow Store is a perfect tribute to the old Dolls sound, a collision of the Rolling Stones and the Shangri-Las. The Dolls, though, are happy to confront their own absurdity, such as on the amusing and catchy Fishnets and Cigarettes (“getting a little impatient, smoking like a mental patient”) and the gently stomping country-rock of Take a Good Look at My Good Looks.

They refuse to conceal their age, despite Johansen’s enduring love of cut-off tops. He groans through the ballad Maimed Happiness like the modern-day Bob Dylan, while the mournful I Ain’t Got Nothing manages the tricky feat of sounding like the New York Dolls while still retaining some dignity.

But can a six-piece band including only two original members really be considered as re-formed? This line-up features several musicians who have worked on Johansen’s solo albums, and this record can just as easily be seen as the latest of the singer’s projects. But that would be churlish. These men peaked in their early twenties without even realising it — they deserve a chance to get it right.

STEVE JELBERT