Friday 09/12/05 Maximo Park, Clor @ Carling Academy, Liverpool

Some nights, you just know a gig is going to be great from the moment you step into the venue.  It may be that the band is playing on the back of their biggest hit, or the gig is a sell-out, or it may even be that the support band has bucked the trend and turned out to be not shit.  Of course, we don’t want to tempt fate, but all these things seem to be happening tonight.  Expectancy courses through the room like a contagion, raising the temperature to feverish levels, in anticipation of one of the closing shows of what has been a phenomenal year for Maxïmo Park.

 

Before that however, we are treated to the wonderful Clor, a band whose left-of-centre star is similarly in its ascendancy.  Having captured the imagination of indie discos up and down the UK with their funky take on 80s synth-pop, Clor have promised to showcase some new material on this tour.  Unfortunately, though, the new songs seem to be off the menu tonight.  It doesn’t matter much however as Barry and the boys knock us out with a set that, judging by the reception it receives, would appear to be quite familiar to a sizeable section of the audience.  The reaction to ‘Outlines’ prompts Barry to dedicate the track to the crowd, and the controlled menace of ‘Danger Zone’ fills the relatively expanses of the Carling Academy with ease.  Looking distinctly un-80s tonight without his trademark springy locks, Barry nevertheless retains his usual charm, challenging the audience to a mass dance-off before firing-up final track ‘Love + Pain’.  Sounding very at home on this bigger stage, it’ll be interesting to see whether Clor can make the step up a level in 2006.

 

Maxïmo Park, on the other hand, will be looking to 2006 with the aim of continuing their rapid ascent into the hearts of this nation and beyond.  Dressed all in black, Newcastle’s finest cut elegant silhouette-like figures on stage as they ignore the rapture that greets them to head straight into ‘A Signal, A Sign’.  From the very first notes of the track, the energy on stage is something to behold: keyboardist Lukas lurches over his keyboard as if being pulled by some unseen force into the crowd while peerless front-man Paul patrols the stage, moving with the grace and urgency of a featherweight boxer.  Throughout, the pace is relentless: a riotous ‘Grafitti’ leaves Paul breathless and the punky chorus of ‘Limassol’ beckons Duncan and Archis stage-front, throwing themselves around with an abandon that matches their singer’s antics.  Later in the set Paul will tell us that ‘it’s the most sweaty we’ve been for a long time’.  Watching them go, it’s hardly surprising.

 

But it’s not just their on-stage athletics that prompts Maxïmo Park to sweat like five Lee Evans’s wrestling in a cramped sauna – it’s also down to one and a half thousand scousers trying to follow Paul’s manic movements in a mass session of indie aerobics.  ‘Thank you for generating heat’, our man quips, before acknowledging how quickly tonight’s gig sold out.  Giving rare outings to b-sides (such as ‘A19’ and a particularly fitting cover of John Lennon’s ‘Isolation’), rarities (the Warchild release ‘Waste Land’) as well as the entirety of the ‘A Certain Trigger’ album (hence the playing of a beautifully fragile ‘Acrobat’), the band belie the size of the venue to create an atmosphere of intimacy, with Paul sharing banter with the crowd and introducing each song, wanting us to share in the very same emotions that spawned the songs.  As the set stampedes to a close with the triad of ‘Once, A Glimpse’, a rampant ‘Apply Some Pressure’ and ‘The Night I Lost My Head’, the crowd reaction swells into terrace chants, and we’re not going anywhere without hearing more.

 

They don’t leave us waiting for long – no sooner has the chant of ‘Maxïmo, Maxïmo’ spread to the back of the hall than have Maxïmo Park filed back on stage to launch into ‘Acrobat’, though not before they tell us what a ‘special night it has been’ for the band.  They also preview ‘Nosebleed’, a new song that continues in the vein of the more immediate melodic tracks on ‘A Certain Trigger’, starting off almost like ‘Babies’ by Pulp before mutating into an unpredictable, jerky chorus that has us wondering how the hell we’re going to dance to that when it hits number 1. 

 

Maxïmo Park leave us with a defiant ‘Going Missing’, it’s lyrics of desperation by this stage imbued with a sense of celebration.  Or maybe it just seems that way.  Because, as 2005 freezes over for what is fast approaching the last time, Maxïmo Park have much to celebrate.  Tonight is one hell of a party.