[Clear And Refreshing holiday report]

Saturday nights at Moles see a different sort of crowd to Purr nights. Weekending country folk, beer monsters and party animals looking for a bit of handbag action mix with the usual indie crowd and it's up to the bands to entertain them all. The Grand Rose Band are local and know the crowd. Their brand of feelgood southern-fried rock mixes well with the one pound (200 yen) a pint Hofmeister. They've been working on a trilogy of murder ballads, two of which are present here, and the singer writhes and thrashes like Jack Black in School Of Rock. Pub rock and proud of it.

There's an unwritten rule of British indie gigs that at any concert by a cool new band there must be two Asian girls in front of the stage going nuts and making big googly eyes at the singer. By that line of reasoning therefore, and by the two little heads bobbing up and down at the front, we must expect big things of The Killers but then after last year's classic "Mr. Brightside" EP our expectations are already through the roof. And how they deliver. New single "Somebody Told Me" is a killer (sorry) and singer Brandon Flowers, aside from having one of the great rock names, is also a fantastic, deliriously grinning, immaculately dressed, theatrical frontman with the added bonus of looking like an even sexier Tim Burgess from The Charlatans. They deliver anthem after anthem and set the tightly packed, double-capacity crowd swooning only half out of heat exhaustion and asphyxiation and we all lap it up because we know that this is the last time that we'll ever see The Killers in a venue like this. Expect them to make an appearance at a Japanese festival this summer and expect them to be glorious. -Ian Martin, Mar.19.04