Slaves
November 8 and 9
Barrowlands, Glasgow
In October 2014 Slaves performed their song Hey on Later... With Jools Holland. A harsh blast of air after Sam Smith's shower of bubbly soul, the Royal Tunbridge Wells twosome blew the audience away.
Jabbing a drumstick at the crowd, vocalist Isaac Holman (a prize-fighting percussionist who keeps time standing up) and sharp guitarist Laurie Vincent (Mick Jones for the zero-hours generation) saw to it that they were the show's highlight, not U2. A month later The Hunter, a more expansive, still mad-as-hell epic that spoke of global doom, was released on Virgin EMI.
A nomination for the influential BBC's Sound of 2015 followed, as did two albums in quick succession: that year's Are You Satisfied? and 2016's Take Control, a Number 6 smash which featured Mike D of the Beastie Boys on the track Consume Or Be Consumed.
Sharing the vocals with the Slaves lads, D was so raging his vocal pitch was threw the roof; both Flavor Flav and Chuck D in one middle-aged white dude having a ball at being furious.
"I like to think of ourselves as a family band," Vincent says. "A thing I've started to see at gigs is 16-year-olds with their 40-year-old parents and their 60-year-old parents too. We've got a really broad demographic from really young kids to much older people. It's always amazing looking out and seeing a mixture of faces, with people who maybe enjoyed punk first time around, which happens quite a lot."
Fans of classic bands such as The Clash (they do a smart line in call-and-response chants), punk's offspring hardcore (witness the Black Flag thrash of new track The Lives They Wish They Had) and Green Day's pop punk, Vincent and Holman have paid their live dues.
Getting together in 2012, they spent much of the following years, "touring the whole of the UK in my Renault Clio," says Vincent. "We'd just drive and drive to whoever would put us on."
Calling from Gent, where the band play tonight, their punk-rock upbringing and popular appeal means they can play to anything from 200 to 10,000 people. They perform two shows this week at Glasgow's Barrowlands after the original date sold out.
"There's something about that raw, intense live performance that I don't think the internet or streaming will ever take away from us musicians,” says Vincent. “There's a raw power in live performance you can't substitute with anything else."
They're punk but they're pop renegades too: new album Acts Of Fear And Acts Of Love reaches back to their harder, foundational influences while being limber - almost danceable.
What's that title about though? Punks traditionally don't touch the stuff. As Gang Of Four, another favourite, would say, it's "like anthrax." Elsewhere, on tracks such as the Daddy and Photo Opportunity, the pair show a reflective maturity and vulnerability rare in a genre most often used as an outlet for rage.
"We felt that everything we had done before this was about what was wrong with everyone else," says Vincent. The cover of Acts Of Fear And Acts Of Love features the pair photographed with his infant son Bart.
"In this day and age, with all this white, toxic masculinity, it made us think we should start reflecting on ourselves and to encourage men to talk about their feelings in general,” he says. “These songs have been a challenge for us but they've been getting the best reaction of the whole set.
“It's not normal for us to feel vulnerable on stage, we're so used to just thrashing about."
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