Maximo Park with Mercury Award
Maximo Park Live Pic2
London Symphony Orchestra Concert
Residencies: British Musicians in China
Selector on air in China
Little Boots Shake DJ Tour Beijing Stop
King’s Singers Shanghai Concert
Bestival2011
London Jazz Festival 2011
Westlife China Tour
Music in the Summer Air
InMusic Festival 2011
Creators Project 2011
James Blunt China Tour 2011
Mogwai: Asia Tour Shanghai Show
Soul2Soul Sound System Live in Shanghai
Suede China Tour 2011
Brian Ferneyhough’s Lecture and Concert
Castalian String Quartet
Music
Music News
Music Projects Archive
Recommended Websites
Back to Arts and culture Index Page
China-UK Creative Entrepreneur Network
Forward Motion British Screen Dance
2010 International Master Class on Directing
Super Vision Design Art Show
John Moores (SH) Contemporary Painting Prize
BBC Symphony Orchestra Shanghai Concert
bahok Farewell In Beijing
cubed: latest UK science news
Scholarships and work in the UK
Register for IELTS
Studying in the UK
Job opportunities
Britain in China
Visit Britain
Britannica
Maxïmo Park Biography
2005 was an exceptional year for Maxïmo Park: they had five Top 20 singles, Apply Some Pressure (twice) Graffiti, Going Missing and I Want You To Stay; toured the world; appeared on T.O.T.P (three times); saw their critically acclaimed debut album A Certain Trigger shoot past Gold status in the UK and receive a nomination for the Nationwide Mercury Prize.
2006 looks set to be a good one too: the band headlined the NME Awards Tour; sold out their own headline tour within two hours of it being announced; played to 100,000 at the biggest rock festival in Asia - Bangkok 100. During the summer they played an array of festivals including headlining the Hi-Fi Festival and the NME/Radio One stage at the Reading & Leeds Festivals, along with supporting the Rolling Stones in Europe. A DVD Found On Film was released on 5th June, which includes live footage from Brixton and Newcastle Academy, a tour Documentary, all the bands promo videos and an audio CD of BBC Sessions.
In 2004 copies of their first, red vinyl seven-inch pairing of Graffiti and Going Missing found its way into the hands of Steve Beckett, Warp Records supremo. Beckett saw in Maxïmo Park and their arresting frontman Paul Smith, something of the promise he had earlier identified in Pulp at a pivotal point in their career. Both bands talk easily about the landscape of boring, shitty Britain, speaking with originality, accuracy, resigned wit and more than a little fire in their bellies.
Paul seems often thwarted in his songs, waiting both literally and metaphorically as the ‘Position Closed’ sign goes up. “That song [‘Signal & Sign’] is supposed to be about seizing new direction and a new dawn, a very simplistic call to arms: ‘Don't waste your life / Just go outside!’,” says Smith. “But the chorus is just a confused person, and there are loads of different moods and other smaller stories within the song. I like balancing simple and complex elements and watching them battle it out with each other.”
In fact throughout A Certain Trigger the band avoid direct musical comparisons because of the diversity of the songs. They also cite the lack of any musical scene in Newcastle, feeling that this “cultural isolation” is a positive influence in terms of doing things your own way. They regulated their own output, brought their own musical tastes to bear in writing their own parts or their own songs. The basic priority for the band, they say, when creating the music was to write honest, direct pop music, no matter how it sounded.
And yet, despite its wildly adventurous scope, A Certain Trigger holds together like a dream. In part this is because of Smith's unique voice and emotionally open lyrics, and in part because of the band's simple approach to sounds and effects. “We deliberately use minimal effects and limit the sounds made by each instrument to give us set parameters in which to work,” says Paul Smith. “We embrace classic pop song structures, and then subvert them at will.” [c.f. Apply Some Pressure]
In constructing this as a whole the band say there was a conscious decision to make every lyric, every part in every song justify its presence, so that nothing on the record would be superfluous. For his part, the words mean everything to Smith and he confesses to delighting in trying to smuggle strange concepts and non-pop phrasing into his work. “Every single line on the record I've thought about individually to see if it stands up in isolation. Often you only get one line on a record to really gets you, and I’m trying to go one better than that. Pop's a transient form of culture and I’m trying to add something of resonance to it”.
Paul Smith is undoubtedly a charismatic and serious young man, but he goes through some kind of metamorphosis when he approaches a stage. “There is a transformational aspect to performing,” he says. “I react to the music and filter it through my body. It's different every night, a different place with a different atmosphere and different people. From my point of view, it’s a very basic thing that happens onstage. People say ‘That Paul Smith, he thinks he's a bigger star than he is’, but when I’m jumping around like an idiot I’ve got no time to think about being cool, or anything other than giving 100% commitment. I am a servant of the music and I’ve got no self-confidence outside of that. It comes out of you and if you can’t express it you shouldn't be on stage; it is after all built on a higher level so people can see you.”
On stage and in the studio, vocalist Smith deals in tight wordplay, his tumult of syllables bombarding the listener and reflecting the singer's state of personal confusion over another fine mess he’s gotten himself into. Throughout their short songs Smith chaffs gently at the boundaries of the pop lexicon, breathing real life into stifling lyrical situations, making them true, in his own language and own accent. So that, without ever seeming to try to be different, he manages to construct a believable environment of small town, narrowed horizons, from which a young man has no choice but to cut and run.
A Certain Trigger was produced by Paul Epworth at Eastcote Studios in West London. Why A Certain Trigger? The phrase is taken from Once, A Glimpse and relates to the emotional triggers that we all have, which can be set off by anything, a book, a passing comment, a song, a memory.
Maxïmo Park are: Paul Smith (Vocals), Duncan Lloyd (guitars), Lukas Wooller (keyboards), Archis Tiku (bass) and Tom English (drums).
