I went to see Metronomy last night here in London and they blew my tiny mind. Again. This time it wasn’t at some bar full of pissed students but at a sold-out show packed wall-to-wall with London hipsters unafraid to bust a move.
I should’ve known it was going to be great. You can’t go wrong when you take falsetto vocals, distorted guitars, kids, plinky plonky keys, a sax, a melodica and some rib cage quivering bass. Throw in some graceless robotic choreography, plus emergency lights strapped to their chests and you have the sort of bonkers electronica that Hot Chip would shit out their dog for.
Check out their video for Radio Ladio.

(Oscar, Joe and Gabriel)

I went to see Metronomy last night here in London and they blew my tiny mind. Again. This time it wasn’t at some bar full of pissed students but at a sold-out show packed wall-to-wall with London hipsters unafraid to bust a move.
I should’ve known it was going to be great. You can’t go wrong when you take falsetto vocals, distorted guitars, kids, plinky plonky keys, a sax, a melodica and some rib-cage-quivering bass. Throw in some graceless robotic choreography, plus emergency lights strapped to their chests and you have the sort of bonkers electronica that Hot Chip would shit out their dog for.

Check out their video for Radio Ladio. Joseph Mount (Metronomy main man), cousin Oscar Cash and Gabriel Stebbing look like they’ve taken a bunch of valium and fallen into a finger paint kit. They spend the entire four minutes trying to touch up a girl who looks like she should be naked in an American Apparel ad.

They also like animals. Specifically dancing badgers.

Not to mention that they sound like owls on helium on their recent 7” Are Mums Mates.

I’ve known Gabriel (Metronomy bassist) since he was 17 and living in a tiny pot smokers haven called Totnes in Devon. He used to be in a sunny Beatles type pop band called The Upsides and Joe was their 15-year-old drummer. Even then Joe was big like an overgrown teddy bear.

The only reason I knew both of them is because I was dating another friend of theirs who I’d met at some Oxford University interviews. I walked up to him in the student bar because I thought he looked like a poetry-writing nerd version of Billie Joe Armstrong.

We went out for five months and in that time agreed to go backpacking through Europe with future Metronomist Gabriel. Predictably we split up, and naïvely, we believed our trio was still a feasible traveling troupe.

Poor Gabriel (pictured above in Rome aged 18): My ex and I squabbled all the way from Paris to Budapest to Krakow to the middle of a desert outside Marrakech. We were miles from anything because we decided the Rough Guide was too trad and off the beaten track was much more fun.

(Here’s us walking off the beaten track).

We were completely lost and terrified so when a Mercedes with blacked-out windows appeared offering us a lift, we ignored our instincts and hopped in.
This was the tone of the entire trip. We’d walk into danger and come out smelling like roses. That’s kind of what Metronomy sound like. They come crashing into the room with a million different instruments and sweet music ends up falling out into our ears.
While watching the girls dance to the band I was brought back to the only thing that didn’t seem serendipitous about backpacking through Europe. It was how both boys would talk incessantly about this one girl they both loved.

A few years later, that girl would end up with the frontman of Metronomy, Joe Mount.
Serendipity at last.

Related posts:

1. THE GADGET REPORT