Ain’t rock’n’roll swell? There are few other places where you can be thoroughly derivative and still utterly entertaining. Witness London (later Toronto), Ontario’s Demics, four students (half of them British) in the sneer-and-swagger school taught by the New York Dolls and, later, the Damned. The band’s self-titled album bristles with eager-to-please energy (never mind that the boys play at being nasty). The poignance when they drop the mask and sing, “I want to go to New York City / They tell me that’s the place to be” is positively heart-wrenching.
The earlier EP (recorded with a different guitarist) offers five equally innocuous and likable slices of punkishness in the same vein, including the aforementioned Stones-like “New York City.”
That song provided the title for a belated CD issue of the band’s oeuvre, augmented by a stack of live tracks and a handful of demos. A few years later, Demics drummer Nick Perry organized an album of London bands covering the long-defunct hometown heroes’ songs.