Klaxons, Rat:Agg:Agg.

Esquires Bedford Lev 2. 15th December 2006.

We may be well into December, but tonight was the first of two of the most hotly anticipated gigs ever at Esquires still remaining this year, with Klaxons hosting an almost instantly sold-out rabble rouser, the like of which probably hasn’t been seen since the place was filled with pikeys with dogs on strings and dirty hair when someone like New Model Army last played here. Nowadays though, the pikeys have been replaced by the glow stick brigade, who were already in party mood when support band RAT:AGG:AGG took the stage.
And this was where the party could easily have stalled before it started. Maybe it was just sitting out the unbearable final moments of desperation to see the NME cover stars in the now unlikely setting of our home turf. Or maybe it was the utterly confusing mess of sounds and styles now overwhelming the place, not helped at all by the continuous switching of instruments and general duties happening on the stage. At this point, let me take you through the gig song by song to give you a better picture…
They start off with a kind of indie-lite / The Jam style, which actually goes down okay despite not being particularly inspiring. Then we move on to Blur when they were trying to be intelligent. Then the girl who’s been playing guitar, tambourine and maracas decides to ditch the instruments and sing something that can only be described as X-Ray Spex crossed with a really irritating kids TV theme tune. Next we endure a bizarre ska / jazz mix, followed by some screamo vocals over the top of a Sabbath-esque riff, which mutates into indie-lite (or diet-indie as it shall now be known – only girls like it) then back into screamo / Sabbath; this is all the same song, by the way. “That sounded fucking awful,” admits the next lead singer, “we usually have a second guitarist.” Jesus Christ, the last thing they needed was more bloody instruments!
(Just to highlight the level of my personal confusion at this point, for some reason my mind was taken back to the first time I heard ‘1999’ by Prince and thinking how far away that seemed at the time to my fragile, eggshell mind, as I played Alcatraz on my friends’ ZX Spectrum, which was released as part of Mastertronic’s pioneering £1.99 range of budget games).
Finally they really go for it with one of the former male lead singers picking up a trumpet - which I assume he took lessons for when he was eleven and recently decided it would add some much needed diversity to their closing ditty if he picked it up again – and took us into a kind of screamo / samba / lounge / music hall confusion. In their defence, the glow-kids seemed to get into this one so maybe it’s something to look out for it 2007. Or maybe they were just overjoyed at hearing the perennial support band favourite, ‘Our Last Song’.

And so we come to KLAXONS. As much as I don’t like putting bands down, I must admit that given the hype and my lack of former knowledge / interest in them, I was ready for the worst; ready for some turgid Automatic Franz Razor Killers sound-a-likes who shit their pants at the thought of having to play in front of a live audience, let alone entertain them. How wrong I was! How wrong…
Before you even notice the music, you’re taken aback by the wave of incredible energy that immediately fills the place, the like of which is generally now reserved for metal gigs, and which I’ve not experienced at an indie gig since the glory days of Ned’s Atomic Dustbin or Carter at the Brixton Academy fifteen years ago. Basically, the whole of Esquires went mental from very start to very end, and I’ll certainly not forget seeing the strobing colours of hundreds of neon lights being punched into the dark Esquires sky.