Franz Ferdinand at Brixton Academy, London, UK 10/24/09
Among the advantages of spending a semester in the biggest city in the biggest English-speaking country in Europe is that it’s the requisite touring stop. Seriously, after registering with Songkick, I had to set aside a separate budget just for concert tickets, there are that many good shows. In a sample week alone, The Dead Weather, Fleetwood Mac, Phoenix, Los Campesinos!, Grizzly Bear, Jay-Z, Clutch, and Wilco all showed up along the Thames, and those are just the big-name acts playing the moderately-sized venues.
Among the disadvantages of spending a semester in London however, is that if Glasgow-based indie post-punk rockers want to go on at 11:30 p.m. and play their impressive range of dancing and thrashing songs in the far south of the city, well past the scheduled closing of the subway stations, then certain members of the crowd who reside in the far north of the city may find difficulty returning home in a timely fashion.
So was the predicament I faced with my German companions Saturday night at the Franz Ferdinand show at Brixton Academy. But to be perfectly honest, nobody cared much about getting home. Alex Kapranos was too busy onstage convincing us that he’s a rock and roll god.
It’s impossible to over-emphasize how truly entertaining the lead singer for Franz Ferdinand is; he’s got all the moves of a great frontman. Dude shows up dressed in a black smoking jacket, matching tie and definitely-not-matching red plaid pants with black leather Oxfords on his feet, climbs atop a personalized amp, spins, jukes and shakes all night, singing songs about burning whole cities down and kisses that taste like cigarettes.
Drummer Paul Thomson’s wardrobe choice tactically displayed the ink on his upper chest and throat, bassist Bob Hardy was as all classic bassists (heard but not seen), and second man Nick McCarthy dressed and acted as though he were Kapranos’s younger brother. They started out hot with the stomper, “Bite Hard” and channeled straight into the uptempo wordplay and grungy guitar hooks in “The Dark of the Matinée”.
It didn’t take long for the Germans and I to realize that we were mistaken to claim space in two rows back from the dead center of the stage. Because when the sleazy, attitude-driven stank of “No You Girls” drum-cracked into high gear, the crowd completely lost it. The way the kids and Brixton hipsters shook and moshed, you’d think they’d never heard electric music before. They shouted lyrics back at the stage word for word all night.
The band brandished the big guns midway through the set, pumping “Take Me Out”, “What She Came For”, “This Fire”, and “Ulysses” in succession about an hour in. They closed the first set with the eerie disco funk of “Outsiders”, and pulled a neat trick by setting up a small drum kit and hammering it together for a thundering fake finish.
A few moments’ pause for encore, and the band returned for five more songs, finishing the night off with their punkiest jam “Michael” and an extended take on “Lucid Dreams”. What got me though, was the justice they did covering LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”. Kapranos captured the hearts of the audience and bound them all together, singing along to the timeless refrain of one of the decade’s absolute best songs like it was stuck on repeat.
The Scots took their bows and wandered off stage, suddenly reducing the crowd to a bunch of people in need of a way home. My friends jabbered in rapid German, trying to decipher the foreign bus lines, and half an hour later I’d nodded off on the N3 to Trafalgar Square, wondering where I could buy a good pair of wing-tips.
