Anyone who believes The Smiths were all about self-pity, poetry and a particular kind of doe-eyed defeatism obviously never caught one of the band’s riotous live shows – wild celebrations of the self-imposed social outsider set to a raucous rockabilly soundtrack and hosted by pop’s greatest panto dame.

Like Smiths fans, pirates are often miscast as lonely outcasts when really they probably had more fun, even minus the odd eye or leg or dose of scurvy, than most of the hapless put-upon landlubbing denizens of the seventeenth century, pissing away their ill-gotten gains in lamp-lit Cornish inns. Though maybe not to a raucous rockabilly soundtrack.

Anyway, Peerless Pirates have been kicking out their swashbuckling-tinted brand of Smiths worship for a few years now, over a series of seemingly unchanging demos, to the point that there’s something positively heroic about their refusal or inability to change one iota. Heck, they’re even still ripping off the same Smiths songs as they ever did.

Thing is, even to point such a thing out would be to miss the point as spectacularly as a misfiring blunderbuss in an Atlantic storm. Peerless Pirates aren’t about progress, or subtlety or, whisper it, nuanced pop poetry. No, they want to hang from the rigging, cask of rum in hand, and have all aboard dance a merry jig to the tunes in their head.

So, ‘Knight In Tarnished Armour’ finds the hearty frontman rhyming “adversary” with “necessary” without a hint of self-consciousness, as guitars twang like cracking timbers behind him, a lounge crooner experiencing his ‘Bingo Master’s Breakout’ moment and letting what’s left of his hair down for the last time. ‘Ella’s Voyage’ is heavy-handed but lyrically defter of touch, while ‘Palatine Bloodline’ finds the singer coming dangerously close to pastiche as he hits those same windswept high notes Moz forever reached for back in his 80s heyday. ‘Throw Down the Gauntlet’ might as well be ‘This Charming Man’ as it hits its chorus, albeit with a lively eastern European feel to it that we wouldn’t be shocked to discover was ripped wholesale from Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’.

Big, bold and sometimes maybe a bit silly, Peerless Pirates are never less than fun. Simple fun yes, but isn’t that the best kind? Not unlike a game of pirates, really.

Listen to the demo on the Peerless Pirates website.