The Last Shadow Puppets review – a manic fairground edge

The Last Shadow Puppet’s imminent second album Everything You’ve Come to Expect may have been recorded in sunny Malibu, but ever since their 2008 debut, the band have always seemed like a twilight proposition. The intensity of Miles Kane and Alex Turner’s bromance has fuelled a louche canon of swooning noir-pop that, on record, sounds almost mournfully indebted to the baroque soundscapes of the 1960s: gorgeous strings, puckering feedback and the sort of twangy, double-octave guitar lines that always seem on the cusp of resolving into Tony Hatch’s Crossroads theme.

Live, there’s the added element of fans used to frugging their way tirelessly through one of Turner’s day-job gigs with Arctic Monkeys. That energy adds a manic fairground edge to this show, and Kane and Turner respond by treating the grand circular auditorium like a gigantic waltzer, roguishly whipping the audience up into even more of a frenzy. Between the boyband-level screams, it’s clear a considerable percentage of the crowd are word-perfect on material both old and new, singing back the lurching waltz of Calm Like You and enthusiastically echoing Kane’s beat poetry freakout on Bad Habits. The overall vibe is a heady mix of lounge Ennio Morricone and macho romanticism, with harmonies as slick as Turner’s shiny ducktail hairdo.

Backed by a three-piece band and a hard-working string quartet rarely visible amid swirls of stage smoke, there’s enough nervy energy to suggest that the Last Shadow Puppets project is more than just a dalliance. It’s just a shame that the slightly muddy sound mix makes it hard to catch the subtler retro curlicues. “We have been the Long-winded Explanations,” deadpans Turner during an encore that includes a faithful rendition of I Want You (She’s So Heavy), before he and Kane wrap themselves tenderly around a single microphone to croon through Standing Next to Me. The affair looks set to continue.