Step On…

Graham Coxon headlined the first Converse night at The 100 Club recently, in front of 140 ecstatic competition winners. Nic Howden reports.

With his six piece band stretching across the venue’s famous logo on the back wall, and beyond, Coxon kicks off with new song Advice, before stepping back to his edgy recent past.

The set hinges around 2006 album Love Travels At Illegal Speeds, extolling virtues (much) more in step with the likes of Wire and Gang of Four than with Blur. But then that’s why he left Albarn and company to it in 2003, forgoing arenas for spit and sawdust, metaphorically.  

Having come to the 100 Club’s rescue from spiralling rents with an unspecified amount of money at the beginning of the year, Converse has been clued up enough not to stamp its name all over the place. It might be a Nike brand now, but it’s content to tie up to one of its consumers’ passions with an eminently credible subtlety all its own.

The Converse series of gigs, which will run through the summer, and quite possibly beyond, promises, ‘today’s freshest emerging artists’, and while that’s not an umbrella Coxon can squeeze under, he brought the ‘must have’ profile to the front of the diary. Every video clip serves to promote the venue to the big numbers, young and the old, who step into a pair of Chuck Taylor high tops in the morning. No venue can survive solely on the strength of its history, but everything at the 100 Club, the intimacy, the low stage, the sound, the sticky floor, the no air conditioning, makes it just as important now as it was when the doors first opened, way back in 1942. And the Converse deal means the club will continue to oversee the schedule of performances alongside this new, free series. Perfect. 

Coxon features on the recently-released Converse track Desire, alongside Paloma Faith and Bill Ryder-Jones, which is available as a free download at: http://play.converse.co.uk/?p=8370 

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