Los Campesinos

Tonight I am at the Foundry, otherwise known as the Students Union of Sheffield University. The support band Me Rex are very very loud unless its purely because I’m stood right next to a speaker stack. They are definitely raucous and very good with a touch of Forward Russia about them. 

Their enthusiasm is hugely infectious and they quickly won over the crowd with a performance of what I'm told was indie punk bubblegrunge (or something like that). However getting deafened by the support band probably isn’t a great tactic.

In between bands I head off to find a beer as Sheffield Uni is usually awash with Thornbridge but not tonight and I come back empty handed.

Los Campesinos take the stage and immediately up the stakes out-racousing Me Rex. Opening with 'A Psychic Wound' from the new album which slides us in gently until the popular threesome of 'I Broke Up in Amarante', 'Romance Is Boring' and 'Avocado, Baby' up the craziness as they add in first crowd surfing and then a circle pit. It's clear already that it's not just the support band who were loud and I'm now very deaf. 

Los Campesinos were formed in 2006 and looking around a lot of the audience would barely be born then. Lead singer Gareth clearly has the same thought and asks how many were here the first time they played Sheffield, in this very room, 17 years ago in 2007. Four hands go up. How many seeing them for the first time… about half the room. All barely older than the lifetime of the bad. Yet when 'Knee Deep at ATP', from the first album, comes round they all go wild. It's very interesting how people get into bands these days. 

The band had a brief moment in the sun in the late 2000s with the likes of 'You! Me! Dancing!', saved as always for the encore, but they were then largely written off but not forgotten. The seven-piece, who cram on to a stage bedecked with banners for just causes, have become cult stars who sadly come around far too infrequently. Their new album 'All Hell' is their seventh but their first for seven years and it is self-produced, self-released and self-marketed on a budget of allegedly just £190. Yet tonight and the whole tour are sold out.

Tracks from the new album slot in neatly within a career spanning set list covering their usual subjects - doomed romances, doomed football, doomed capitalism etc. On of their new tracks 'To Hell in a Handjob' is apparently about 'punching fascists with your mates'. Musically, they don’t miss a beat.

Gareth gives up the mic briefly for keyboardist Kim takes the lead on the wonderful 'kms' before taking it back and insisting that the rest of the set will all be 'bangers', if anyone has any energy left. I could have done with that beer.