Kaiser Chiefs – Brixton Academy, London

When we first arrived in the UK it was a bit of a baptism of fire music-wise. Sure there was quite a bit of stuff I know and love – but there was also a whole suite of bands with crazy sounding names that I’d never heard of suddenly clogging up the record store racks, popping up on the radio, and turning up on the music video shows.

Pretty quickly you start to hear a few things you like, and before you know it there’s a stack of CDs on the bookshelf by bands I’d never even heard of this time last year! Kaiser Chiefs album “Employment” was one of the first of the big UK bands to really grab me. I’ll admit I got sucked in by the singles (how good is ‘I Predict A Riot’?) and a three song appearance on Later with Jools Holland really sealed it for me. So after giving their debut album a thrashing – I was pretty happy to be able to get tickets to see them at Brixton Academy.

The show was part of some beer-sponsored festival “Carling Live 24” - that has a bunch of bands playing all around London for 24 hours. That said – Kaiser Chiefs came on a little after 9pm which is I believe is the standard start time for headliners – so I think it was part of a festival in name alone.

Kicking off with ‘Everyday I Love You Less and Less’ the show has a pretty high intensity and the band played with surprising fire (given this was one of the last shows for an over year-long tour to promote their sole album – you’d forgive them for getting a little bored playing the same set). They did thrown in a few odd ones – the feisty b-side ‘Take My Temperature’, and a few new songs ‘Heat Dies Down’, ‘Learnt My Lesson Well’ and ‘Highroyds’ that bode well for that difficult second album.

Highlights for me where ‘I Predict A Riot’ (with the crowd jumping so much I did, for a sadly not too brief moment, wonder if the upstairs balcony could take it), the slower ‘You Can Have It All’ where Ricky plucking a fan out from the front of the crowd to waltz with, and the show-closing ‘Oh My God’.

All in all – a pretty great show, as I remarked to Kimbo – it’s rare to see a band like at the first peak of their powers.