Maximo Park

Maximo Park – Queen’s Hall

Live music, Music Review

Maximo Park are thrilled to play the Queen’s Hall for the first time, even when things don’t go exactly to plan.

The music of Maximo Park, the indie rock outfit from northeast England, has been called many things over the band’s 20-plus-year history, including – but not limited to – “intellectual”, “energetic”, “intense”, “political”, “optimistic”, “endearing”, “romantic”, “emotional”, “passionate” and “sincere”. A lot of very broad, human qualities embodied in their sound and in their lyrics especially. At different times they’ve been categorised as “alternative rock” and “post punk” and “art pop” but regardless of pigeonholing the loudest reviews have generally been quite positive; critics like to say nice things about this band.

I’m not here to argue with the tastemakers of history but one thing that isn’t mentioned enough, in my opinion, is how awkwardly self-aware this band is and has always been. And when I say “this band” I’m really talking about its most expressive incarnation, its mouthpiece. I’m talking about Paul Smith, frontman, lyricist, self-anointed spokesperson, social media manager, mailing list usurper. The singer who appears to be 105% present in every performance and 110% in his head at all times.

Paul Smith has made a career out of turning the banal surreal, out of punctuating abstract scenes with his own unmistakable, visceral, whiplash-inducing lyrical couplets. He’s very good with the words. And dancing. And singing, too; excellent with the singing. Yet, when he’s on stage he often comes across as if he’s dodging imaginary word bullets. It’s like his superpower is intuiting what not to say so as to avoid getting retroactively cancelled in 30 years’ time. It must be a real struggle when you have such an actively extensive lexicon, to find just the right way of saying “this song is about geographical privilege in the arts” or “bodily autonomy”, for example – legitimate examples, by the way – and yet Smith insists on trying this for every song, or at least every other song and most songs in between. It’s distracting to watch him calculating in real time – he talks a lot for someone who says very little – but true fans and word nerds understand and appreciate the effort. He’s really a sensitive, new age guy.

Anyway, no-one talks about this nearly enough for my liking.

You know what makes this band so great? And, especially, what makes this band so great live?

Duncan Lloyd: Founder, guitarist, songwriter and former co-frontman – once-upon-a-time, before the incumbent magnetic frontman arrived – this guy is just effortlessly cool. His mere presence brings the average temperature of any room down by approximately six degrees Celsius. Understated is an understatement when you’re talking about Duncan Lloyd – he’s on stage, guitar is everywhere but you have no idea where it’s coming from because this guy has effervesced into pure sonic air. That’s right, this guy is so cool he defies physics. Also if you look up the Maximo Park Wikipedia timeline of band members you’ll see that for the last five years Lloyd is credited with guitars, keys, bass and backing vocals; the guy could literally form a Maximo Park one-man tribute band.

Speaking of one-man bands…

You know what else makes this band so great?

Tom English plays the drumkit like it’s an orchestra, like he’s an orchestra. Like he’s conductor and concertmaster; melody, counter melody, harmony and – of course – percussion. He exacts tonality, timbre and tempo from his instrument with the stone-faced charm of Charlie Watts doing his best impression of Animal from The Muppets, or vice versa. His style is emphatic, idiosyncratic. His fills often underscore the ferocity of Lloyd’s own percussive strumming without ever entertaining the spotlight for even a second, though you’d happily listen to him pound out a sixteen-minute solo, given half the chance.

I could go on. I will go on.

Jemma Freese, joined the band as a touring member in 2019 following original keyboardist Lukas Wooller’s departure and immigration to Australia – he’s doing fine; he DJs with a friend of mine in Melbourne sometimes, comes back to visit family in Yorkshire and complain about the weather. Jemma Freese is now an integral part of the Maximo Park live set-up and like Smith’s higher consciousness she probably doesn’t get the attention she deserves. There are times when, especially on the earlier songs, the only thing elevating their performance above the band’s very energetic original recordings is that deliciously indefinable X-factor that is the human voice, Jemma’s voice, and also a particularly juicy keyboard line delivered with just the right amount of spice. Jemma Freese is a musical master chef and connoisseur of tone. When she sings, you listen. When she plays, you feel something: sated.

What’s missing?

Bass. Okay, sure, sometimes in acoustic sets they’ll go without, but you wouldn’t go without, if you had a choice. Listening to Maximo Park songs without bass would be like watching The Wizard of Oz without the colour green. It’s the same story and the characters are all accounted for but suddenly that witch isn’t so scary and the Emerald City is, well, it’s just a city, isn’t it? There’s a fantastical magic about the basslines that Maximo Park deploy, something elemental, that was forged in their very beginning and that carries on today through the presence of Andrew Lowther who was loaned to the band by their musical brothers, Field Music, and who now, like a shared favourite toy, has to be agreeably passed back and forth between the two bands seemingly until one of them outgrows their enjoyment of him, or he’s broken beyond repair. Hopefully never the latter.

So these five humans get together in Edinburgh on a gloomy, autumnal Friday night in 2024. They bash out 18 songs in roughly 75 minutes. I know without checking my watch that it’s about 75 minutes because in the 30-something times I’ve seen them live they’ve only once pushed the 80-minute mark. They have a setlist formula and – eight albums in – they’re sticking to it. The sound is surprisingly good for a room that’s not designed for or suited to amplified instruments.

It’s going well for them until halfway through when a crackle in the monitors breaks Smith’s concentration and the system has to be rebooted. It’s fine, actually, they weren’t building great momentum with the new song / old song / new song rhythm at that point anyway, more of a haunted house stop-start carnival ride energy. This added bit of improvised drama plays into the performance-as-art-installation vibe they’ve been cultivating on the recent instore junket for Stream of Life, their latest collective release about geographical privilege and bodily autonomy (among other things). They persevere serendipitously towards emotional and technical catharsis through a semi-acoustic rendition of the album’s title track that’s really nice. And then they power through the rest of the set like it’s business as usual, which it is: Two back-to-back smash hits to close out the set and then two unsuspecting old favourites for the encore.

Now there’s a word to describe Maximo Park that doesn’t come up very often: Consistent. They’re a consistent live band. They’re consistent on record. They’re reliable. Professional. These aren’t the sexy qualities that we lust after in our Rock Gods and Pop Stars, these are traits on a whole other level. These are the characteristics we seek out in life partners, ride-or-die besties, colleagues, godparents to our children and, importantly, qualities we aspire to embody ourselves. We seek and we find them in our favourite bands. No wonder critics like to say such nice things about them.

Maximo Park – Barrowland Ballroom

Live music, Music Review

Paul Smith is selling socks at the Barrowlands.

“We’ve got three-hundred pairs to shift,” the Maximo Park frontman tells his attendant audience, “and tea towels!” Hosiery and kitchen linens may not be conventional stock at most indie rock concerts but in the face of unsustainable economic structures and an industry in crisis, creative merchandising is a necessity. It isn’t enough to simply write, record and release great songs because no-one pays for great songs; artists have to sell stuff, and sell well, to finance their musical endeavours and basic living. Having great songs will help though.

To this end Maximo Park have hit the road to tout their wares throughout the UK. As Smith explains at one point, “We had a single. We wanted to tour the single hence, the Singular Tour.” Following the release of their nearly chart-topping seventh studio album, Nature Always Wins, in 2021, and a run of sold out shows across the country just over 12 months ago, the band are now treating audiences to a Maximo Park retrospective comprising “only the singles” – and for tonight, one B-side – with each city’s set containing select songs voted for in advance by the local fan base.

Dutch outfit Pip Blom are tasked with warming up the steady stream of early arrivals. Their formula of sugary vocals and occasionally fuzzy guitars is a bright and effervescent delight, dynamically building through the bluesy lilt of Tinfoil into the grungy Pussycat before overflowing with quaint garage-pop on Keep It Together. Heads are bopping throughout the crowd. It’s a good sign.

The Park’s set, by contrast, takes more than a moment to find its rhythm and direction. Or rather it opens with a certain rhythm, alternating consistently between crooners and kickers, before switching to a smooth, upward cadence for the latter half. The aforementioned B-side, The Night I Lost My Head, comes out of nowhere within the first three songs and, while a generally energetic bop, it sits incongruous to the more mellow grooves of Leave This Island and Hips and Lips which follow. The crowd are undeniably into it though. “If you wanna do a bit of dancing I will also do a little shuffle” Smith declares, as if he had no plans to move otherwise.

This isn’t a nostalgia trip proper and it’s evident that the nature of the tour has been successful in drawing out fans of each and every part of the band’s catalogue. The emphasis of the singles tour is on songs all people (theoretically) will have heard, not just die-hard or historic fans, and as such the audience has a more diverse emotional investment in this set. No song is ever met with indifference despite some having not felt the spotlight for a few years.

“Stay hydrated; we’ve got a lot of hits to get through” Smith quips, semi tongue-in-cheek, before launching into The National Health, during which the audience are surprisingly well-behaved. This one used to be quite a rager. It’s not much longer though before pints are flying and Smith is leaping, scissoring the air, illuminated in deep red and blinding white; the tones of A Certain Trigger. A thickset man is propped up on shoulders during Karaoke Plays and the atmosphere is becoming intensely sentimental.

Great Art, the single that precipitated this roadshow, repackages the band’s typically poetic social commentary while deploying as iconic an earworm as Radio 1 could ever hope for. It’s a popular one across the generations of listeners in attendance and serves to unify the energy from the stage all the way to the lighting desk. What follows from this point could be described as a passionate ascension which says as much about the music as it does about the band-audience relationship.

The intense romance of Questing, Not Coasting, a song about “falling in love in a thunderstorm”, has fists punching the air and arms swaying hypnotically. Our Velocity is a perfect song, worthy of dissertation, that somehow delivers more with every performance – especially in this room. The Kids Are Sick Again feels weighty and poignant, perhaps more than it ever has.

“If this is your first gig, welcome to Maximo Park. This is for you!” Smith announces before walking to the side of stage, allowing spotlights to focus attention on Duncan Lloyd’s silhouette and coarsely chiming guitar intro to Going Missing, the band’s first ever single. The crowd response is unparalleled with sustained, rapturous applause and spontaneous stamping. The same follows Books From Boxes, arguably the most beloved of fan-favourites, leaving Smith speechless for a few moments before humbly declaring, “This is why we do it.”

The set concludes with superb renditions of Versions Of You and Apply Some Pressure, both immaculate demonstrations of the band’s musical ethos and proof that the key to artistic longevity lies not in sales techniques or creative merchandising but in perfecting one’s craft. Great songs are what really matter. They drill this point home with a masterclass of an encore; Midnight On The Hill, Girls Who Play Guitars and Graffiti. Smith introduces his bandmates over relentless cheering, finally stating “My name is Paul and I’ve had a wonderful time”. You can’t half tell as he lingers long on the stage, radiating joy and gratitude, and basking in its elated reciprocity.

Here’s hoping they sold a lot of socks, because they certainly rocked plenty off.

A version of this review was published by The Modern Record

Maximo Park – Boiler Shop

Live music, Music Review

Maximo Park kicked off their first proper UK headline tour in four years with an exuberant sold-out hometown show at Newcastle’s Boiler Shop on Saturday night. Having been rescheduled from the early summer due to ongoing restrictions the show took place just two and half weeks since the band last performed in the city. On that occasion a small run of shows celebrating their 2007 sophomore album Our Earthly Pleasures was offered in gratitude and as an incentive to fans who bought their newest album Nature Always Wins which charted at number 2 in the UK upon its release back in February. A series of album release out-stores was also scheduled in late August with a couple of festival slots thrown in as well, so in actual fact the band should have been in the full swing of national touring by now.

A lot can change very quickly in these times however, as we’re all acutely aware, and in the intervening period singer Paul Smith contracted, isolated and “recovered” from Covid-19, and so the first spark of magic around this night is that it even happened at all. Knowing the type of energetic performance Maximo Park usually deliver, it’s not unreasonable to think they might have delayed to allow Smith more time to restore his stage-fitness. Yet in taking a risk and going ahead, under the circumstances, they gave a performance that redefined audience expectations and the very concept of leaving it all on the stage.

Beautifully matched in support for this tour is the charming indie pop of Chester’s Peaness, who take as much delight in saying their band name as the audience does in hearing it. They seemed genuinely unfazed by the scale of the event or the weight of their responsibility, and their performance rightly carried an air of confidence and easy-going frivolity. Despite their dinner order not arriving in time to eat before going on stage they were utterly delightful, bopping and thumping their way through a set of tight harmonies and catchy refrains, welcoming all latecomers in from the bitter rain and wind outside.

From the moment Maximo Park walked on stage the atmosphere was thick with a kind of heavy joy and sparkling excitement; the room was ablaze with anticipation. For many people this was their return to live music and the band, knowingly, pitched a set to allow for maximum relief and release. New songs featured strongly throughout and were received with astonishing fervour. There can be no denying the singalong quality of recent singles like Baby, Sleep or I Don’t Know What I’m Doing but even the quirky stop-start ambling of Child of the Flatlands was met with grateful enthusiasm. “Thanks for going on that psychedelic journey with us there” Smith quipped when it was done. An interesting mix of iconic hits and obscure singles representing each of their six previous albums fleshed out the set, a particular highlight being Calm from 2009’s often neglected Quicken The Heart album. It was obvious from their response to each and every song that this was a crowd at capacity with love for the band and their music. Such rapturous, spontaneous and sustained applause might have felt excessive in pre-pandemic life but “in the parlance of our times”, as Smith referred to it, the greatest and most authentic expression of appreciation is surely a whoop and a clap. The band clearly felt it too; their joy at the exchange and pure thrill of performing live again couldn’t be contained and lit up their faces relentlessly.

If Paul Smith was feeling any lingering effects of illness on his lungs he didn’t let it show through his voice, neither his pitch nor sustain was impaired – in this writer’s opinion it was perhaps his best vocal performance of the year so far, and whether this was down to some extra effort in preparing to tour post-virus or simply a quality of the room on the night, it was undeniably powerful. While he purported to be losing his voice towards the end of the main set he still mustered a scissor kick during Books From Boxes, then when he admitted he was succumbing to fatigue the band blasted through a hyper rendition of Limassol before taking a quick break and returning for a three-song encore.

              “As you can clearly see / I’ve lost some luminosity / I hadn’t bargained for such intensity”

The opening lyric to Partly Of My Making bore a tangible irony that the audience seemed to relish. It’s not the easiest count if you’re dancing or swaying along but vocally the crowd gave as good as they got out of it. Had it not been demanded so emphatically the band probably could have gotten away without an encore, given the dazzling intensity of the first sixteen songs. But of course, they hadn’t played Apply Some Pressure by that point either and with each passing song and Smith’s energy waning there was a hint of disbelief when the moment finally came to close out the night with such a potent song. More than ever live music proves to be a healing force and Maximo Park know just how to deliver that vital medicine.