Monday 3 June 2013

ART BRUT at THE SCALA, LONDON


Proving a picture paints a thousand words is this photo of a sockless Eddie Argos taken by Darren Brooker (@IdleFret) last Wednesday. Tells most of what you need to know and saves me writing yet another Art Brut live review.   

The band were celebrating their tenth birthday with a sell-out show and the release of their career spanning collection, Top of The Pops. As you can see it was a boisterous affair. 

For all Argos’s insistence Art Brut are now a “classic rock band” they remain perennial pop dreamers. Music and being in a band is to them something magical: dreaming of being on Top of The Pops, of playing huge arenas, having school kids on buses singing their songs. It’s at the core of pop bands; even shouty slightly daft ones.

They've made four albums cataloguing drunken escapades, fumbled sex and, of course, the love of pop music but it’s their live shows where they excel with their infectious wholehearted delivery. I’ve maybe seen them ten times and every single time they’ve played as if it was their first and last gig and were having the most fun known to mankind. By the end Argos implored everyone to form a band. “I can’t sing, Jasper Future can’t play guitar, just form a band! Promise me you’ll form a band!” If you believe the show of hands there is nobody at the Scala now not in a band. It did seem like a good idea.

(For previous - and far less lazy - Monkey Picks Art Brut gig reviews see Electric Ballroom or  Bull and Gate).

No comments:

Post a Comment