Touring with Maximo Park

They eat gold discs for dinner.

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This is going to be a bit like one of those food blogs where you have to read someone’s life story before you get to the recipe. So, if you’re just after the useful, delicious bit - tour dates and ticket links - please just scroll to the bottom. I won’t be offended.

For everybody who is staying Maxïmo Park anecdotes.

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The first time I heard Maxïmo Park was when John Kennedy played The Coast Is Always Changing on XFM. I was instantly jealous of it. “The coast is always changing” is such brilliant imagery for a song: a change so gradual you barely notice it, yet so vast it reshapes everything. I wished I’d thought of it. Unfortunately, because of how I was back then - puritanical about indie music and very competitive - instead of just enjoying the song, I immediately started wondering whether I would need to add them to my growing list of enemies - or to my much shorter list of people I admired and would like to be friends with in real life.

Art Brut’s first real-life encounter with Maximo Park was on our debut UK tour, they were a sudden late addition to our Middlesbrough date, and put above us on the bill.

So, I thought: on the enemies list it is.

Then I saw them - and they were EXCELLENT. They’d jumped on the bill to celebrate their first Top 20 hit with Apply Some Pressure, and the whole thing felt like a victory lap. I could hear a lot of my favourites in their sound straight away: XTC, The Monochrome Set, Prefab Sprout - all those art-school instincts wired into sharp pop songs. A fucking brilliant art-rocker band breaking into the charts without compromising their sound - that’s something worth putting my ego aside for - friends list it was.

That night, to celebrate, they shared their prosecco with us - and afterwards, had organised the roof of the dressing room to collapse onto their bass player Archis Tiku’s head, like a shower of Artex and plasterboard confetti. Perhaps that last part wasn’t planned, but it was excellent nonetheless.

After that, we zigzagged around each other a lot - a big MTV show in Germany stands out, where they lent us drumsticks because we’d turned up hungover and forgotten ours. Afterwards, we ended up dancing together in one of those now-vanished indie discos in Prenzlauer Berg. I think it’s now a Bio Company.

Here we are supporting them at a show in Moscow.

Later that year we toured the UK with them too, and after the final show, as we stumbled out into the night in search of something to eat, we spotted them carrying cardboard boxes. We tried to scrounge a couple of slices of what we thought was pizza, but they said they couldn’t share - not because they were selfish, but because, as they sheepishly revealed, the boxes didn’t hold pizzas at all. They were gold discs. I loved how bashful they were about it, what a bunch of awesome dudes.

Anyway, much like those food blogs, there isn’t really a point to these stories - it’s just my way of saying how delighted I am that we still get to zigzag around Maxïmo Park twenty years later.

Here are the tour dates

UK

Europe

See you there! It’s going to be a blast. TICKETS HERE