Live review: shame show off their entertaining and chaotic best at New Century

shame’s frontman, Charlie Steen, is a unique figure. Bare-chested with a white collar and sleeveless leather jacket, he looks like a deranged crossover between a Hell’s Angel and a priest. Naturally, being a member of a band, the former’s Nazi motifs are replaced by support for Palestine and the Music Venue Trust and there’s absolutely no hint at any sort of devout faith – other than at one point in the gig when he gets some of the crowd to get onto the beer-covered floor and meditate. As he struts out onto stage at their recent show at New Century, the rest of the band has already kicked into gear.

The band all look relatively normal, which makes Steen stand out even more. It is as if he’s a hallucination that’s stepped out of someone’s bad trip. He spends the whole show dancing around the stage, giving orders to the crowd – which explodes into a pit almost instantly – and screaming the lyrics to a series of often bizarre post-punk bangers. All of this gives a bit of a glimpse into a band that has spent the last decade building up a cult following, first in the sweaty back rooms of Brixton pubs and now nationally or even internationally. The other part of that, of course, is that they make some very good music.

The set began with a series of songs from their new album, Cutthroat. While the album itself marked a step down from its predecessors, these tracks worked great live. ‘Cowards Around’ was particularly impressive, with lyrics that seemed to come straight out of the ideological framework of Cambodian dictator Pol Pot in their anti-intellectualism and general hostility to the human race, though of course much more tongue-in-cheek. These are supported by a driving rat-a-tat-tat drum line that seems a bit like something you’d get in the run up to a trick at the circus, it set an early standard for the energy of the performance.

Next came ‘Concrete’, a song from the band's debut album Songs of Praise. This was more traditional post-punk but no less engaging, with a chorus built to be shouted along to.

The audience were then treated to about an hour and a half of non-stop chaos. It’s hard to really describe every moment of a gig like this – at a certain point you have to accept that taking notes while getting shoved in every direction wasn’t really working – but the best praise that can possibly given is that time itself passed unnoticed. Some highlights that cut through the noise include ‘Adderall’, an empathetic take on drug addiction that brought a needed moment of calm to the gig, and ‘One Rizla’, the band’s biggest hit and a piece of angsty but sincere songwriting so good that you can almost see smell the stale tobacco emanating from its protagonist.

The final song – the title track of Cutthroat – ended the evening in style. Steen dove off the stage and sang a large chunk of the song while crowd surfing, as those below him swirled about in pure cathartic chaos. As they had done for most of the night, large chunks of the crowd sang – or, more accurately, hoarsely screamed – along to the song's absurd, bacchanalian lyrics about “big beautiful naked women fall[ing] out the sky” and “do[ing] what you wanna do”.

When the song finally screeched to a halt and the lights flicked back on, it felt like a grand moment of release. All around were tired and sweaty, but ultimately happy, faces.

https://open.spotify.com/album/3Wm7UlvuhjWq4kiUBOqZeE?si=P04tcCuLS-erCwrzQa_HQQ