Provided you weren’t in outer space at the time, you most likely heard about Kate Bush’s recent, highly publicised residency at the Hammersmith Apollo. You may not, however, have heard of Japanese techno-pop practitioners Perfume and their live show of retina-melting lasers, meticulous choreography and illegally catchy pop songs. They’ve had no press coverage in the UK and made precisely zero impact on the charts or radio (they had the 68,000th most-played song of 2013, fact fans). Yet they’ll be playing the very same Apollo as Bush later this month, a gig that follows a sold-out show last year at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, which has since been immortalised on DVD and Blu-ray.
Perfume are not the only foreign act who, while barely shifting a download in this country, are selling out our most popular venues. Japanese and Korean pop troupes have led the way: boyband Big Bang sold out two nights at Wembley Arena in 2012, for example, while their peers B.A.P. – nominated for Worldwide Act at this weekend’s MTV EMAs – played Brixton Academy at £75 a ticket in April. Close behind, there’s Valeriya who is touted as the “Russian Madonna” (her demure response: “I don’t admire Madonna as a singer because I don’t think she’s a good one”), but who sounds a bit like Lulu. That might explain why her last album sold fewer than 300 copies in the UK. But even so, her first British gig was at the 4,000-capacity Royal Albert Hall. Or there’s Punjabi musician Diljit Dosanjh whose debut UK tour saw him sell out venues including Birmingham’s NIA.
Polish gigs are hot tickets, too. Last month, facepaint funsters COMA – basically a louder and funnier Blue Man Group – played at Southampton’s The Brook, a venue that later hosted chart-topping boyband Rixton. Not to be outdone, fellow Poles Wilki and Kasia Kowalska co-headlined London’s Indigo2. Meanwhile, Israel’s answer to Ben Howard, Asaf Avidan, sold out London’s Union Chapel before he’d released an album in the UK and followed it with two nights at the Islington Assembly Hall last month.
Thanks to that wonderful invention the internet (seriously, Google it), fans now have access to a broader range of music, bypassing things like radio playlists to make their own (Avidan’s total “scrobbles” on Last.fm, for example, are close to 2m). Not only that but promoters such as Live Nation, which covers 40 countries, have become better at targeting expats – or, as they put it, facilitating their “international acts’ presence in many new regions”. So what’s next? Fingers crossed the UK live scene will become the living embodiment of Simon Cowell’s cruelly aborted World Idol series, COMA rubbing painted shoulders with the latest J-pop ingenue, while Avidan strums out a plaintive lament.
