POP, JAZZ REVIEWS : DOCTOR & THE MEDICS

“It’s Saturday night. I’m somewhere I’ve never been before and I’m enjoying myself,” the Doctor enthused toward the end of Doctor & the Medics’ show Saturday at Fender’s. “Thank you for being so warm--and sweaty.”

So it went throughout the English band’s enormously entertaining local debut: Everything received a wry twist from the Doctor (nee Clive Jackson) and his five Medics.

This engaging silliness ranged from Doc’s irreverent between-song patter to the goofy choreography executed with deadpan aplomb by the two female singers called the Anadin Brothers. The music itself was hardly exempt from this off-center frivolity.

Indeed, the group infused humor into its spirited garage-pop whenever possible, and with originals like “No One Loves You When You’ve Got No Shoes,” that was most of the time.

And, no doubt, their delightfully warped sensibility guided their choice of outside material. The band not only performed its hit remake of Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky,” but also tore through renditions of Little Richard’s “Good Golly, Miss Molly” and Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid.”

The truly impressive thing about Doctor & the Medics’ shtick is that it never wore thin, partly because it was presented with witty charm and partly because the sextet didn’t overdo it. The whole breezy blast, including encores, clocked in under an hour.

Even the encores inspired a self-mocking gag from the Doctor: “This is a band that comes back for encores if a pin drops.” It got a far more audible response than that Saturday--and rightly so.