Considering the colossal 02 Academy is about a ten minute walk away, the Windmill may be a more adequate reflection of London’s most ill-reputed borough than its counterpart: hidden away and out of public consciousness.
Tonight, however, it’s home to two of the biggest names in underground British-styled punk-rock. Everyone’s obviously turned up for New Jersey’s punk-rock luminary Ted Leo, but support band Keith TOTP feature another sizeable name (figuratively and literally) in Eddie Argos. The Art Brut frontman is lumbered with the bass-guitar tonight and plays second-fiddle to the aforementioned Keith, the two of whom have been playing together for well over ten years as best friends. Tonight they’re supported as a 7-piece, hogging the Windmill’s unusually-accommodating stage for a venue of its size, with multiple guitars, a saxophonist and a mute woman in the corner playing a saw.
Unsurprisingly the music is distinctively flavoured with some typically-Argos shambolic witticisms – closer ‘I Hate Your Band’ features such gems as ‘All your fans are still in school’, ‘No-one knows the bass-player’s name’ and ’You’re unknown outside the M25′. The point appears to be forcing as much noise out of the assembled instruments as possible, hitting somewhere between bluesy and garage rock but always prioritsing immediacy; though Art Brut evidently show more range and subtlety (as do The Datsuns, thinking about it) it’s a great spectacle of half-arsed showmanship. There’s a rambunctious cover of Mud’s ‘Lonely This Christmas’ and they’re freely admitting to ripping off Eels and the Aquafresh toothpaste advert, but the highlight of the set is a dedication to the Beatles: a completely irreverent, almost annonymous tribute which rides on the hook ‘My favourite albums are the Blue, White and Red / Two of the Beatles are dead’. It then goes on to question the fractional proportion of how many Beatles are left if we’re including Brian Epstein or Stuart Sutcliffe. By the end of the night they’ve cemented themselves as a great bar band but probably little else, which – knowing Argos’s heroes in The Replacements and The Hold Steady – is probably exactly what he wants.
The easy-going enjoyment of his predecessors is something that Ted Leo is finding difficult to emulate – without his usual backing band The Pharmacists to banter with he’s left onstage with nothing but his electric guitar and technical hitches-based material to save him from an austere crowd who’re evidently disappointed by the lack of a full outfit onstage – ticket sales weren’t slouchy, but many outlets (thank you, seetickets) weren’t specific in noting that tonight would be a solo show.
God forbid you bring the matter up with Ted, though: he cuts a likeable but somehow imposing figure in the flesh, which owes just as much to his ‘Holy shit that’s quick’ guitar fretting as to his surprisingly husky speaking voice. It doesn’t help that most of the front two rows appears to be made up of Ted’s merry band of New Jersey fanatics, whom he says he’ll email about regarding their weird conversation topics later.
This can be forgotten, however, with the opening chord of ‘Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?’, getting the gig started for all concerned as the third song of the set with its bouncy, indelible lead-off riff. As descriptions go it’s one that holds true for every song of the set – the highlights are those that sound least dependent on the regular band, rather than in some way providing better, alternate versions of the studio versions. ‘Bottle of Buckie’ is an evergreen anthem, even without its Celtic woodwind flare in the bridge, and ‘Timorous Me’ was only ever about the country twang anyway.
It’s impossible to target particular moments of the evening in which Ted falls short; even though the quality-difference in his full-lengths has fluctuated he plays a good portion of the better songs from each of his most recent five, including the upcoming ‘The Bruitist Bricks’, and they’re all of a consistently good quality. But so many of the songs in the set get lost to over-familiarity – there’s no diversity in the playing (would an acoustic song be too much to ask for?), just memorable songs interspersed with album-fodder: for every ‘Under the Hedge’ there’s a ‘Bleeding Powers’. Only 50% of the man’s greatness is limited to his guitar: without full-band staples like ‘Bomb. Repeat. Bomb’ and ‘The Ballad of Sin Eaters’ he’s left to rely on the stuff that works with just a guitar, even if its quality is debateable.
The upcoming material is equally unreliable; it’s the supposedly more percussion-based ‘One Polaroid a Day’ that stands out as the better of the two new tracks, hinting at a greater use of dynamics (though with a widdly outro). Ted’s willing to ‘compensate’ with old songs, though: the end of the evening peters out with three covers, one from Leo’s previous outfit Chisel, a pretty good cover of Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Keep On Pushin” and an entirely plain finale of ‘Dancing in the Dark’. As a closer it seems a strange gesture, like an admission of inferiority just to be a crowd-pleaser. It’s not a necessary one, but for all his gusto Ted simply hasn’t been enough tonight – the songs are there, but there’s not enough behind them. A disappointment, but it seems like his hands were tied.
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