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CUD U LIKE
Cud, The Astoria, London. Melody Maker, November 2, 1991
THE man is a star. In so many ways, he shouldn't be - Carl Puttnam is, after all, plump, bespectacled and a style-free zone, and most of Cud's songs have always been whimsical, surreal parodies of all that rock music is meant to be. But even if he doesn't wanna be adored like Ian Brown, he's clearly the idol of, ooh, hundreds at least. It only takes the crisp opening chords of the might 'Eau! Water' to show that Cud are now an immediately accessible pop band, and that their audience is thoroughly devoted. And these days, Cud don't seem that far out of the mainstream.
'Eau! Water', after all, combines the two most important qualities tat hip music lovers have demanded over the last couple of years - a massive guitar surge and an instantly danceable rhythm - and with it's likeably lecherous lyrics ("I wanna plunge right into you"), it's also something of a sex anthem. It's more than enough to turn the Astoria audience into a writhing, delirious, uncritical mass of humanity.
Cud are far from being a one-man band; it takes four to produce these crisp, choppy rhythms and mix them with whirling basslines and angular guitar shapes. But it's Puttnam, tonight a perverted Presley figure all in white, who's the centre of attention and adulation. It's his friendly monster of a voice, booming out with a crazed confidence, that does most to generate the eccentric excitement that surrounds Cud. This band know exactly what they're doing, although they sometimes seem to like to pretend otherwise.
If any doubts on the subject remain, the sensuous "Love In A Hollow Tree" and the flowing mutant funk of the single "Oh No Won't Do" dispel them. There's also some stirring new material, in which Cud stride boldly toward hard rock and hard funk, and a rampant rewrite of The Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" entitled "Pink Flamingo".
The early "Strange Kind Of Love", a standout among the rabidly-demanded encores, is a fitting anthem for this band. Cud retain sufficient strangeness to act as a rallying point for the awkward and the alienated, but if these unlikely sex gods didn't show how to get women melting and hundreds dancing then I'm a prawn in Whitby. They Cud. And they did.