The Magic Numbers

Imagine if Kings of Leon had taken all their inspiration from The Beach Boys, and then they had lived on a diet of fast food and every fatty product they can lay their hands on. You should now have a pretty good image of what The Magic Numbers look like. They’re hairy, they’re fat and they’re ugly too, and that’s just the female members.

The Magic Numbers are responsible for rejuvenating the happy, melodic beach pop sounds of the 60’s. This is something that The Thrills have been desperately trying to do for the last three years.

Lead singer Romeo is joined by his sister Michelle (Bass), his mate Sean (Drummer) and his sister Angelica (Keyboard and vocals). The obvious influences are The Beach Boys and The Mamas and The Papas and at times The Magic Numbers do a sound a bit too much like these bands.

They opened with ‘Which way to happy?’ followed by ‘Don’t give up the fight’. The crowd for The Magic Numbers was enormous and the band has steadily risen in popularity throughout the last couple of months. It’s even got to the stage where it is difficult to get away from them on the radio.

'Forever lost' was the first real crowd pleaser, and as the sun beat down on Staffordshire in the early afternoon it was quite difficult not to warm to The Magic Numbers and their summery pop. In many ways they are the quintessential V Festival band; as indie as you can get, jingley acoustic guitars, hand clapping and harmonies reminiscent of classic Travis.

‘Love me like you’ is similar in almost every respect and the crowd bobbed along in appreciation to The Magic Number’s most popular song. The real brilliance of The Magic Numbers comes from the perfect harmony created between the male and female members’ voices.

It’s refreshing to see how appreciative the band is of the crowd. There is no egotistical swaggering from The Magic Numbers and they couldn’t believe the reception they got. In many ways they reminded me of Keane on the same stage, at a similar time last year.

The band performed ‘Loves a game’ and ‘I see you, you see me’ before closing with ‘Morning Eleven’. The set lasted a fair while – and the band had come on early, to the delight of the huge crowd that they had managed to pull in.

The Magic Numbers were very good at what they did and it was the prefect live band for that time in the afternoon but I couldn’t help noticing how alarmingly similar they were to The Thrills.

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