Gig review: Maximo Park at O2 Academy Leeds
Keenly aware of the nostalgic pull their early material holds, the Newcastle alt-rock favourites still have a few tricks up their sleeve for this celebration of their debut album.
There’s still 20 minutes due until Maximo Park take the stage, but already, the O2 Academy Leeds is in boisterous voice. Spontaneous chants have broken out across the stalls, bellowing the refrain from DJ Ötzi’s ubiquitous Ibiza-drenched classic Hey Baby (Uhh, Ahh) at regular intervals.
By the time the Newcastle alt-rock favourites emerge from the rings, there is an air of slight delirium that frontman Paul Smith is only too happy to indulge. “We’re going to play some songs,” he teases with a coy eyebrow, lithely bedecked in mauve suit and matching trilby. “You might have heard of some of them.”
Those crammed up to the rafters of the venue’s balcony certainly have. They may have shed a few members since their poster-pinup heyday but the band – Smith, guitarist Duncan Lloyd and drummer Tom English – remain keenly aware of the nostalgic pull their early material still holds over a sizeable portion of the public.
They are in town to celebrate the 21st anniversary of their debut A Certain Trigger – the record’s coming-of-age party, so to speak, replete with velvet curtains and enough strobe lights to start an indie disco rave through spontaneous combustion.
Still, there are a few tricks up their sleeves. Rather than play the album front-to-back, the group parcel out chunks here and there amongst other material, keeping their audience on their toes. It is an approach that mostly pays dividends and allows for a natural expression of their sound and evolution in the intervening decades too; Signal and Sign’s kinetic post-punk racket carries similar affection to the Smiths-esque shuffle behind Postcard of a Painting, but feel removed in intriguing ways from the fizzy synth-strafed hullabaloo of Our Velocity, or the melancholic throb that powers Leave This Island forth with aplomb.
So too does Smith get to indulge in a few deeper cuts, strutting through the early b-side A19 with the wry air of post-glam appropriation. Elsewhere, the band’s soft-political nous still feels eerily prescient, exemplified by a rollicking The National Health.
“They’re all slightly strange songs, but that’s fine,” the frontman says before a terrifically wiry Books From Boxes. “That’s why they’re our songs.”
As celebrations go, this is a warmly affectionate one.