Are Maximo Park the geekiest band in the world? Well if they are, they’re making being nerds fashionable again. The previous holders of the geek crown holders were Pulp but they’re no longer on the scene and Maximo Park are taking on the crown. I first saw and heard Maximo (pronounced Max-eee-mo) Park supporting the Kaiser Chiefs at Leeds Town Hall in 2005 and although the Kaisers were the better performers, Maximo Park’s songs were far superior. Their dancing was awful – the keyboard player danced like a demented robot but I thought they were so good that for the first time in my life, I bought the album of a support act. But at Leeds University you could see how far they’d come. From a support act with a few loyal fans cheering them on to a headline act that had left the gig sold out weeks earlier. They sounded confident, had a bigger sound and the front man Paul Smith – complete with bowler hat – interacted so much better with the audience. The audience had been well warmed up by two very bizarre but entertaining bands. I walked in to see what I thought was a kids’ band playing, only for it to turn out to be Das Wunderlust. They seemed to have a lead singer who was with them on work experience. She regularly screamed, constantly grinned at the rest of the band, and seemed giddy in the extreme. Yet the indescribable music was… strangely brilliant (and yet I can’t tell you how). Then came Art Brut where the lead singer spoke all the words to the sound of roaring guitars. I laughed out loud at his lyrics. I’ve never done that before at a gig! So, back to Maximo Park. They started off with a rip-roaring Graffiti before going on to one of the stand out tracks of their new album Our Earthly Pleasures. Girls Who Play Guitars had the front of the crowd bouncing, while those at the back craned their necks for a view of Maximo Park’s bad dancing. Maximo Park’s songs are perfect for concerts: Three minute snippets of pure indy pop with their trademark sudden endings. It means three minutes of frenetic dancing with a welcome short break to recover. And tracks like Apply Some Pressure, and my favourite, The Coast is Always Changing, were sucked in by the crowd like a man gasping for breath after emerging from water. And as for A Fortnight’s Time – that surely should be Maximo Park’s next single – if only on purely mathematical reasons alone… So Maximo Park seem to have really made it. Named as one of the best live bands around at the moment, it is a treat to have seen them. And of course they will remain an inspiration to me – proving once and for all you can be geeky AND popular. | 
