dEUS – KOKO, London, 11/09/2011

The first time I heard dEUS, it was 1999 and I’d just bought the first issue of Rock Sound. ‘Everybody’s Weird’, from The Ideal Crash was on the cover CD, alongside tracks from such luminaries as the Stereophonics, Feeder, Kent, Coal Chamber and Creed.

Even looking at this list now astounds me. ‘Everybody’s Weird’ is undoubtedly the most leftfield track from The Ideal Crash and stuck out like a sore thumb on the freebie. As a 16-year-old, it scared the crap out of me; and I loved it. My relationship with has dEUS continued in pretty much the same manner ever since.

I’ve always been slightly surprised when I hear a new album; mostly in a good way. They’re one of the most dramatic and expansive popular indie bands of my lifetime and for that, I love them.

London’s KOKO is ostensibly a grand, Victorian Theatre, but the décor has always, to me, suggested something more sinister. It’s slightly spooky. Just like dEUS. The stage is set for the veteran Belgian rockers; or so you would think.

The show starts as it will continue for much of the evening: sluggishly. A number of tracks from the new album Keep You Close are workmanlike, and whilst the band are a solid unit, there‘s little to shout about for much of the first hour of the set. Tom Barman’s vocals are low in the mix; his interaction with his packed crowd is limited. The one bright spark of the early exchanges is the fiddle playing of Klaas Janzoons: indeed, he provides an entertaining one-man sideshow, shoehorned onto the left of the stage as he is.

Perhaps unsurprisingly (if a little sadly, for a band whose output has been steadily impressive up to the present day), it’s “the classics” that give the night the shot in the arm it requires. Queued up by a successful marriage proposal deep in the crowd, ‘Instant Street’ provides the first singalong moment of the night. The band, spurred on my now lively crowd, picks up the pace; the spiky solo outro ushering in a couple of energetic crowd-pleasers, before the encore (with the band’s two most AM friendly songs, ‘Sister Dew’ and ‘Little Arithmetics’) steals the show.

dEUS are a slippery fish: not a band to set your expectations by. Tonight, though, is one of the rare occasions in which the surprise isn’t so welcome. Leaving KOKO, the unshakeable mood is one of anti-climax: a term few would ever have credited dEUS with before.