Just as there are teenagers who cannot remember life without the internet, so there may soon be teenagers who cannot remember a time when Daniel Powter's Bad Day was not in the Top Forty. Officially, the Canadian singer-songwriter's single has been there since mid-July - 24 weeks! - yet it seems much longer. A recent government report claimed that not even the advent of nuclear holocaust could remove Bad Day from the charts: cockroaches would go out and buy it. Its creator however is playing tonight not in a vast arena, but in a small venue in a shopping precinct. Given the single's ubiquity it's a bit underwhelming, but then again, the kind of success Bad Day has enjoyed is built on reaching not die-hard music fans but the people who never normally buy CDs, let alone attend gigs.
The good news for them is that there's plenty more where that came from. No one could accuse Powter of confusing his audience with eclectic material. He deals exclusively in the semi-jaunty, piano-led keep-your-chin-up soft-rock ballad: by contrast, Coldplay's live set constitutes a perplexing series of musical left turns.
The one surprise is his falsetto. These days, every soft rock singer-songwriter needs a falsetto in much the same way as every punk musician once needed a high tolerance for being spat at, but Powter's is something else. During the opening Song 6, he unleashes something only audible to dogs. (Perhaps it's them buying Bad Day.)
Canine appeal aside, what sets Powter apart from his fellow soft-rock singer-songwriters? His colourful past? He was, he says, "heavily addicted to drugs for years". Rather inevitably, he has written a semi-jaunty, piano-led, keep-your-chin-up soft-rock ballad about that as well. Female voices predominate in the singalongs, suggesting a similar appeal to James Blunt: a bit rougher around the edges, maybe, but then half the Shadow Cabinet could reasonably claim to be rougher round the edges than James Blunt. Commercially at least, there are worse things to be in the current musical climate. There could, it seems, be plenty more Bad Days to come.
