It doesn’t take long for the exuberant US band leader Bartees Cox Jr, AKA Bartees Strange, to remove his bass and jump into the audience, hustling the crowd into movement. He’s the sort of frontman – genial, casually commanding – who can break ice fast, a skill probably honed during his time playing in New York hardcore bands. His current outfit’s slew of back-to-back Texas gigs at the music industry festival South by Southwest the other week has also served as a warm-up for this short, but resonant, UK tour.
It helps, too, that the banger his four-strong outfit are playing – mostly on drum pads and synths – has a chorus so nagging it takes just a second to worm into your ear. Flagey God, off Strange’s first album, Live Forever, was named after a feeling that once came over him in Place Eugène Flagey in Brussels. He was so unanchored from his usual contexts, and therefore from expectations, that he felt he could do anything, be anything. In that square, he was a god.
