Allo Darlin’ at Scala, London N1

4/5

ARRIVING on stage Elizabeth Morris, lead singer and lyricist with Allo Darlin’, asks the crowd to be supportive and to make sure they sing along as the band are feeling very emotional tonight.

They have every right to be. This is the Anglo-Australian four-piece’s final gig, having announced they were splitting up last September.

And what a show it is — chock-full of melodic and insanely hooky indie guitar songs from their three superb albums, including their wonderfully naive 2010 self-titled debut.

 The “hits” come think and fast, from early singles Dreaming and Polaroid Song to the growing pains of Crickets in the Rain and rock-out Bright Eyes.

Having moved, like her musical heroes The Go-Betweens, from Queensland to London, Morris’s lyrics talk of dancing until dawn, night buses, romances won and lost and existential uncertainty — all imbued with a deep longing for her homeland and old friends.

On Let’s Go Swimming, Morris sings a hymn to “all of the punks in Camden,” and “all of the hipsters in Shoreditch” and “all of the bankers in Moorgate.” Has any other band captured the experience of being young and lovestruck in, and with, the capital as brilliantly?

With just the right mix of vulnerability, gleeful positivity and melancholia, Morris is the perfect, engaging frontwoman and one of the best lyricists working today. She’s backed by top-drawer boys in the band, especially Paul Rains, whose impressive guitar licks give the music its infectious pop edge.

 As the party atmosphere builds the encore ends with a barnstorming version of fan favourite My Heart is a Drummer, seguing briefly into a bouncing cover of Paul Simon’s You Can Call Me Al, before balloons and ticker-tape fall and the band and their close friends start dancing.

A fitting send off for a much-loved band. They will be sorely missed.

Ian Sinclair