- The second night of the BBC’s Electric Proms is a rock fan’s dream dance line-up, and KOKO the perfect venue for it. Situated in London’s punkiest suburb, the former Camden Palace is home to Club NME, a band/DJ showcase that is many an indie kids’ gateway to rock n’ rave hedonism. The nineteenth century theatre provides a surreal backdrop for dancefloor debauchery, with the tiered arrangement of the balconies and blood red walls conjuring Dante’s Circles of Hell.
Enter: Justice. They may be the most successful export from Ed Banger, the Parisian home of maximal house, but the sheer balls-out rockiness of their breakthrough album ‘†’ owes more to heavy metal. They’ve so completely co-opted the genre’s imagery (gothic logo, black leather, hair) that, to the uninitiated, their live show looks like a satanic mass. As the thunderous double bass drums of ‘Genesis’ give way to feedback squalls, a falling curtain reveals two huge stacks of Marshall amps flanking the iconic glowing cross - as fans lucky enough to pick up identical neon talismans at the door raise them in the air.
Over the next hour, Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay’s speaker-testing mash-up of their dirtiest, glitchiest and funkiest moments is met with pumped fists, devil’s horns and heads-down moshing. A new indie disco high is reached when the French duo loop the sirens of Klaxon’s ‘Atlantis to Interzone’ over their own anthem ‘We Are Your Friends’, and a sweaty oik slam dancing nearby screams: “JUSTICE ROCKS!”
The Chemical Brothers established their own indie credentials by working with singers like Noel Gallagher and The Charlatans’ Tim Burgess, then going on to rock harder than their collaborators at festivals worldwide. Tonight’s intimate gig is more warehouse than main stage, but it has the same widescreen, wide eyed wonder as the brothers’ biggest shows. The spectacle is enhanced by twisted, psychedelic visuals (huge eyeballs, legions of marching robots, an ‘IT'-like clown mouthing “get yourself high”), but hinges on precision sonics. Compared to their support act, Tom and Ed’s own career retrospective is more focused and more carefully blended, from We Are The Night album opener ‘No Path To Follow’ to the title track, via some of the nineties and noughties’ most memorable tunes.
The rest of the stomping crowd might disagree, but the planning that goes into playing on a NASA-sized bank of equipment leaves the headliner’s performance feeling a bit over-thought and predetermined. In fact, the mid-set technical problems that kill the sound for ten minutes are a godsend, finally forcing the Chems to improvise and re-build ‘Surface to Air’ from the ground up. The following run of ‘Under The Influence’, former electronic battle weapon ‘Saturate’ and the Bloc Party-fronted ‘Believe’ proves the most electric part of this prom night, and can’t be eclipsed even by the BBC-friendly finale. While performances by guest vocalists Tim Burgess and Beth Orton provide a sense of occasion, a show-stopping double whammy of ‘Leave Home’ and ‘Block Rockin’ Beats’ prove that the brothers can work it out just fine on their own.