Lucie Barât and The Au Revoirs at Off The Cuff review

Image: Lucie Barât and The Au Revoirs

Tucked away behind Herne Hill train station, Off The Cuff is by day: an auction house, a film society and a children’s reading corner. You have to admit, it’s not the obvious choice for a single launch.

By night, it's a cosy, in-elaborate venue where people come to lounge about in big leather chairs and drinking pints of Peroni over hazy conversations about the next big names in music.

The gig starts at eight, but people will keep turning up until 10. You turn up alone, maybe as a pair, and within a few minutes somebody’s bumped into you and introduced you to one of the bands and their sound team.

Everyone’s on first name terms by the end of the night, and that’s how it seems it’s supposed to be.

There are no barriers to be broken down, no people you feel you aren’t really supposed to be talking to, and several drinks down the line you’re in the smoking area with the band again, slurring broken anecdotes five minutes before their set.

Accessibility does seem key to the band’s warm first impression. They separate themselves from the aloofness of the bands and the venues just north of the river by being that bit more down to earth, by sauntering around the crowds and dipping in and out of conversations.

It’s a good look. It seems to justify the intimacy of the kind of music they make, justifies the act itself as something more than a few clever licks and a strong hat. Real characters telling real tales. A little personality thrown into new music.

Character helps to flesh out a band that otherwise exists only as a series of online demos, and the crowd, whilst modest, meets The Au Revoirs with the right response.

Barât’s vocals are, at times, drowned out a little by the equipment, but the big sound competing with the tiny venue gives it that raw, unfinished touch.

On the front line, the band are brash, noisy and enthusiastic, offering themselves in a vivid and convincing sales pitch. Eccentricities are played up, inhibitions toned down, and by the end of the set it becomes genuinely hard to see where the stage ends and the crowd begins.

The end of the gig is a blur of camera flashes and cars disappearing off in different directions, and it suddenly hits you how quickly the last five hours went by.

From Herne Hill, the walk home is anhour long sigh of exhaustion, sigh of relief, as the madness burns out — but it’s more of a breather than an ending; The Au Revoirs, with 'Fallen' (listen above), have announced an open invitation to anyone willing to come, and it’s clear it’s going to be a late one.

Read: Bill Ryder-Jones in Manchester review