“This is the biggest gig we’ve ever fucking done,” announces Isaac Holman, the drumming singer in Slaves, with awe. Even when the band are not playing one of their pell-mell punk effusions, security are kept busy, creaming crowd-surfers off the top of the simmering mosh pit.
Wearing white trousers and – at least initially – a black shirt, the topless Holman shows little sign of the dislocating shoulders that have blighted his band’s winter victory lap of the UK (many dates have been rescheduled). Apparently, a few nights earlier in Newcastle, Holman just popped one offending shoulder back in and played on. Punk rock!
Whatever the specialist in Birmingham did to him the following day, it seems to have made the 23-year-old impervious to pain. Holman bashes at his minimal standing drum kit, dancing non-stop; he lets guitarist Laurie Vincent – dressed in his two-tone opposite, black trousers and, at least initially, a white top – carry him around in a sweaty bromantic hug. He climbs the speaker stacks.
Perhaps it’s just the band’s continuing endorphin rush, tamping down the pain signals. Slaves are one of the home-grown success stories of 2015, and one of the unlikeliest. In 12 months, they have gone from gimmicky niche concern to selling out the 5,000-capacity Brixton Academy; London shorthand for proper success. Their Mercury-nominated debut album, Are You Satisfied? – the pink one, with the twin bichon frises on the cover – charted at No 8 on release, helped in no small part by being enthusiastically embraced by Radio 1. Under the aggressive veneer, it is packed with jaunty sing-alongs.
We have grown accustomed to guitar’n’drum duos making a racket that scales up to the big tents. There is also a fresh appetite for political-ish songs that tackle the ridiculous state of things, as many of Slaves’ songs do. Underlined by a magnificently skulking riff, the opening verses of their greatest hit, The Hunter, take in global warming, fuel poverty, and how the straights just don’t understand. And lions. It’s all capped off by an off-hand “yeah” that rivals the off-hand “yeah” in Katy B’s old tune Lights On for poetic South London emphasis. You can hear obvious predecessors like Blur in rare slow songs like Are You Satisfied?, delivered by Holman seated on the lip of the stage, while Vincent strums an acoustic guitar. Mostly, though, this Kent twosome seem several chords short of a White Stripes or a Black Keys or a Royal Blood. They lack the vitriolic lived experience of Sleaford Mods, two decades older and many polysyllables deeper. Riff, bish-bosh, snarl, repeat; it’s frequently basic stuff, a little redolent of 90s London punk band Snuff, who supplemented their own high-speed ditties of dissatisfaction with humour, expressed in their covers of adverts.
Slaves covered Wham!’s Last Christmas in the tongue-in-cheek “oi” fashion recently on Radio 1’s Live Lounge, reprised with some gusto tonight. As it’s Christmas, their band mascot, a guy dressed as a manta ray, dons a Santa hat for Feed the Mantaray – a song that mixes approval for sea life with exasperation about overhearing the neighbours’ arguments through paper-thin walls. The Santaray stage dives repeatedly, flapping and flailing. When a cry of “Gerald!” goes up, Vincent notes drily that he has the “most popular dead goldfish in the world.”
Their fans see no disconnect between this japing about and the harder-hitting side to Slaves. The duo cover grime star Skepta’s Shutdown with word-perfect ferocity (he’s playing Brixton the following night) and the place goes nuts. They sing a song about walking a girl to her car in case she gets attacked by a Sasquatch, and the place goes nuts. It might be the season, but you can’t help but warm to Slaves, whose skinned heads and tattoos don’t come with any discernible trace of recidivist attitudes.
And if you can poke holes in their gonzoid take on verité, well, Holman has an answer to that. “I know it’s predictable and somewhat cliched/But if you wanna get your point across these days/ You gotta be real real real straight,” he sings on Are You Satisfied?. They play a blinder. We leave satisfied.
