Art Brut, 6th Feb 08
Feb. 8th, 2008 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaI slogged home on the bus on Wednesday night, in the spirit of saving money, and then ate my tea and sat down with the laptop. My to-do list has had 'check out Art Brut tickets' on it for about three weeks, and there was an email from some ticket service or another that mentioned them as touring in February, so I took the opportunity to have a quick squint at the dates. A few moments of open-mouthed double-takes later, I twigged that the doors for the London gig at ULU (five minutes from where I work) were opening in fifteen minutes. Three quarters of an hour and seventeen pounds ninety later I was stood at the side of the venue with a pint of Guinness, feeling quite smug.
The support band were called Popular Workshop, which abbreviates handily to Pop Shop for t-shirts. They certainly didn't start with a following but I think they won a number of people over. Bassist flailing around in rolled-shirt-sleeves and tie, metronomic drummer and a guitarist who remembers grunge, it was all a bit Fugazi via the Futureheads. Kept me amused, anyway, I grinned through quite a lot of the set, and I'd be happy to see them again somewhere.
Art Brut were doing two nights in a row at ULU, and the night before they'd had a string section. Tonight it was brass; trumpet, trombone and something that must have been either a baritone or bass saxophone. The brass started out on stage on their own with the 2001 theme tune and as Art Brut came out, managed to make it morph into Direct Hit, which was a great start. Eddie Argos wasn't quite up the standard of all-round proclaimer of wisdom I'd been expecting, but he did keep insisting that having a brass section made them a Big Band. Other claims for the evening included both Emily Kane and his little brother being in the audience, hence not hamming either of those songs up half so much as I've heard is possible. Still, the brass section were generally a bonus, not really being in a position to get in the way of something as simple and direct as an Art Brut song and making their own contribution to the overblown endings that seem to be necessary to the Art Brut experience. It was a fun gig all round, with a good-natured bouncing pit (Eddie managing to crowd surf at one point) and all the songs you wanted to hear (though let's face it, they've only got two short-ish albums to pick from) and lots of shouting about being Top Of The Pops, though at the same time they were never going to blow anyone's musical mind and I can see how seeing them repeatedly would get old. Worth it for the sake of taking advantage of being in London and able to go to large gigs at zero notice, if nothing else.
The support band were called Popular Workshop, which abbreviates handily to Pop Shop for t-shirts. They certainly didn't start with a following but I think they won a number of people over. Bassist flailing around in rolled-shirt-sleeves and tie, metronomic drummer and a guitarist who remembers grunge, it was all a bit Fugazi via the Futureheads. Kept me amused, anyway, I grinned through quite a lot of the set, and I'd be happy to see them again somewhere.
Art Brut were doing two nights in a row at ULU, and the night before they'd had a string section. Tonight it was brass; trumpet, trombone and something that must have been either a baritone or bass saxophone. The brass started out on stage on their own with the 2001 theme tune and as Art Brut came out, managed to make it morph into Direct Hit, which was a great start. Eddie Argos wasn't quite up the standard of all-round proclaimer of wisdom I'd been expecting, but he did keep insisting that having a brass section made them a Big Band. Other claims for the evening included both Emily Kane and his little brother being in the audience, hence not hamming either of those songs up half so much as I've heard is possible. Still, the brass section were generally a bonus, not really being in a position to get in the way of something as simple and direct as an Art Brut song and making their own contribution to the overblown endings that seem to be necessary to the Art Brut experience. It was a fun gig all round, with a good-natured bouncing pit (Eddie managing to crowd surf at one point) and all the songs you wanted to hear (though let's face it, they've only got two short-ish albums to pick from) and lots of shouting about being Top Of The Pops, though at the same time they were never going to blow anyone's musical mind and I can see how seeing them repeatedly would get old. Worth it for the sake of taking advantage of being in London and able to go to large gigs at zero notice, if nothing else.