Shame, Electric Ballroom, London

From the Sex Pistols’ infamous scene-starting show at the Lesser Free Trade Hall to the 2009 V Festival slot that would become Oasis’ final ever performance, history has a tendency of loading some gigs with a whole heap of retrospective gravitas. What seems like just a good night out can wind up, 10 years down the line, as your inadvertent “I was there” moment. Rare is the gig, however, that makes its importance blisteringly clear for all to see right then and there. But then rare are the band with the sheer ferocious vitality of Shame.

Since the release of debut ‘Songs of Praise’ back in January, the South London quintet have been on a hurtling upwards trajectory. Five star reviews; magazine covers; broadsheet praise: though the record only landed in the lower end of the Top 40 upon its arrival, there’s been a palpable sense of something growing ever since. Having ended 2017 still regularly stomping around Brixton Windmill, you feel, if they wanted to, they could probably end 2018 by headlining Brixton
Academy. Sure, they’re not going to be challenging The 1975 for record sales any time soon, but for a young, angry, politicised guitar band, they’re straddling the line between critical plaudits and genuine grassroots fan fervour better than anyone in a good while.

And so we enter Camden’s Electric Ballroom – an uncharacteristic foray across the river, as the band quickly point out – for Shame’s first hometown victory lap since unleashing said debut. Sold out months in advance, tonight is undeniably ‘the hot ticket’; before the quintet even enter, there’s the tangible sense in the room that we’re about to witness A Proper Moment. And holy hell, do they deliver.

If singer Charlie Steen has always harnessed the chaotic magnetism of a true frontman – a curious, grubby, disgusting, alluring mix of rallying vigour and sneering disdain, throwing his entire physicality into every moment with vein-popping intensity – then tonight he finally looks the part too. Decked out in a white boiler suit and sunglasses with a newly shaved crop, he’s like the wild-eyed protagonist in a Hunter S. Thomson hell-scape, aggressively spitting out the tumult of ‘Lampoon’ one minute and lasciviously rubbing spit into his chest during the grotesque prowl of ‘Gold Hole’ the next.