<< Back To Press Melody Maker : Live Review : Splash Club : London, May 1995 Commitment. Jesus, no one believes in that corny, party-pooping shit anymore, do they. I thought about compiling a list to wave triumphantly in the faces of crabby vets on VE Day, should any of them start going on about the youth of today and how they don't care about anything anymore. Then I realised that it would be a depressingly short list, that in fact there would only be one name on it - Whipping Boy. If this kind of heart-heaving commitment and blow-torching intensity, this reluctance to armour-plate their souls has you backing off because it's now so deeply unfashionable, well frankly, fuck you! Dublin's Whipping Boy may never have plumbed Joy Division's depths of existential despair, but that's how far back you would have to go to be similarly shaken and stirred. And, if front man Fearghal McKee - charisma on a stick pretty much - is not the spiritual and vocal flyover that links Ian Curtis with Van Morrison, then I'm the Duke of Edinburgh. McKee is so utterly possessed, so deep inside his songs tonight its like he has left the door to his soul wide open and its banging in the wind. I don't know how it happens - neither does he, probably - but suddenly midway through the ferociously fulsome 'We don't need nobody else' he's pulled his clothes off and is standing there bollock naked and bug-eyed. Singing like he's alone in the world. It's McKee's way of saying he has nothing to hide. Every song tonight is a perfect blend of sexual savagery and (hyper) sensitivity ; there's huge, scary, sucky wind-tunnels of guitar and soft blizzards of dream fuzz; there's the pop drone of Sonic Youth; Bailterspaces industrio- humanism ; the molten flow of Catherine Wheels 'Black Metallic'; the same early dawn grey that washes over Bowie's 'Heroes'; the sublime single moments of U2, JMC and Swervedriver (sure they had em). Its a sound as brave and big-hearted as a bear. If Twinkle, their sky ruling king shit of a single doesn't do it for you then I suggest you apply for a heart transplant at once. Here the guitars sound like skidding concordes and the shamelessly swollen line like 'she's the air I breath / not too pure for me' is skewed by 'hole right through her head / I think I might be nothing to her'. Reality, as McKee knows, will always bite. There are old songs - the quasi mystical rant that is 'Highwayman' the slow stampede of 'Favourite Sister', 'I think I miss you' where McKee is practically vomiting raw emotion - but they climax with the slow-rushing 'We don't need nobody else'. Its a mini-drama about the deceptive cosiness of an intense relationship 'I hit you for the first time today' McKee intones. 'You wouldn't let me go to the phone / you wanted to make love and I did not ..... and you thought you knew me'. You won't find that one shifting many tubs of 'Hagen-Daas'. At a time when irony has just become a crap excuse for hiding your heart, Whipping Boy still reckon conviction and intensity still count for something. Tonight, my finally tuned fraud alarm didn't go off once. That's important. Sharon O'Connell