Review: Paul Smith @ The Deaf Institute

Reviewed by: Jayne Robinson

Date: 2nd December 2010

Maximo Park’s Paul Smith may just about be the best frontman in the world. Ever. So expectations were high for this solo tour, which has seen Paul temporarily leaving his band mates behind and visiting some of the UK’s smaller venues to peddle his newly released solo album Margins.

Smith has enough charisma to fill an aircraft hangar, so containing it in this intimate room resulted in an electric atmosphere. The singer may have toned down the physical aspect of his performance to meet the slower pace of his solo material, but his boundless energy and lust for his art was no less apparent, with Smith bantering between songs and thrashing his guitar around like a child playing at rock star.

Margins is an altogether more toned down, stripped back affair than your standard Maximo Park fayre, and some tracks are positively glacial; both in tempo and beauty. Opening with the intimate ‘While you’re in the Bath’, Smith sings soberly in little more than a whisper to a silent crowd and we wonder if he’s jacked in the high jinks in favour of becoming a Very Serious Artiste.  But ‘North Atlantic  Drift’ and ‘The Crush and the Shatter’ follow, bringing with them the familiar Paul Smith angles and eccentricities.

Smith is in a jovial mood tonight, and he’s obviously enjoying the opportunity that this more intimate venue gives him to re-connect with his fans. Looking around at The Deaf Institute’s kitsch, bird-patterened wallpaper, he says “It’s nice to be in such a well decorated room. It’s the first time I’ve been surrounded by cockatoos. Though not the first time I’ve been surrounded by... oh nevermind. That’s a story for another night.”

‘Improvement/Denouement’, ‘Alone I would have Dropped’, ‘Syrian plains’ and the Maximo-esque ‘Strange Friction’ follow, and it’s clear that most of the crowd at the sold-out gig are already familiar with the ins and outs of Margins, despite it only being released in October. The album has somewhat polarised critical opinion, but to fans of ‘The Park', Smith can clearly do no wrong. The album’s slow-burning tracks come alive in performance, and the sold out crowd are clearly hooked.

More Margins tracks follow, with Smith bantering like an old friend in between songs. “Now let’s go from laughter to... complete despair” he says, striking the first sombre chords of ‘I Wonder If’, before instructing people to ‘shuffle’ to ‘This Heat’. “It’s a real shuffler!”

A highlight of the set comes with Smith’s utterly hypnotic cover of Arthur Russell’s  ‘A Little Lost’, and when Smith croons the lyrics “Cause I'm so busy, so busy/Thinking about kissing you/ Now I want to do that/ Without entertaining another thought”, it seems as though every member of the adoring audience would be happy to oblige. Yes, even the men.

‘I Drew you Sleeping’, and ‘The Tingle’ follow, before Smith finishes his set on the first single from the gorgeous first single from the album, ‘Our Lady of Lourdes’.

After a short break, Smith leaps back on stage for an encore, bigging up Manchester’s independent record shop Piccadilly Records, before launching into ‘Pinball’ (with drummer ‘Hodson’ on eukelele).

The show ends with a nod to his band in the form of a couple of lesser known Maximo Park tracks – ‘Tanned’ and ‘By The Monument’ – which, with their slow tempos and luxurious, narrative lyrics slot seamlessly into the set. 

It would have been easy for Smith to throw a crowd-pleasing couple of Maximo Park favourites into the mix on this tour, and judging from snippets of overheard conversations, some of the crowd members were hoping that he might. But then what would be the point of that? It’s clear that Paul Smith is seeing this venture as a tangent that’s entirely separate to the band, and despite a tantalising sample of ‘Apply Some Pressure’ mixed into ‘By the Monument’, he managed to resist the temptation.

And so he should.

Read our interview with Paul Smith here