Live Review :: Paris Youth Foundation :: Buyers Club, Liverpool - Dec 16 2017

Live

Paris Youth Foundation

Buyers Club, Liverpool

December 16 2017

Words/Pictures: Jane Davies


Paris Youth Foundation enjoyed a meteoric kick start to their career last year. Named after graffiti spotted in a Parisian metro station and championed by BBC Introducing Merseyside, they found themselves on the BBC Introducing stage at the Reading Festival playing their first gig. This year they had a return ticket to the Reading Festival, playing the Republic Stage. At Liverpool’s Sound City Festival in May, they impressed Little Indie and filled the second stage; a tent that positively bulged at the sides so early in the morning and on a Sunday at that!

A very large and buoyant audience fills the upstairs venue at the Buyers Club; a wish come true for the band, who an hour earlier had appeared live on the local BBC Introducing show saying that they would be delighted to sell out a home show at Christmas. Well, it was that time of year when wishes come true and this was duly granted as they stepped on stage to Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’.

It was straight down to business and ‘If You Wanna’ raced in to get the Christmas party started. Energising, exuberant, harmonious and uplifting are words that go part of the way to best describe the PYF sound. Lead singer Kevin Potter gently ambles round the stage putting heart and soul into the microphone. Their previous release, ‘Lost Cause’, cooked up a storm and was anything but lost on the audience with big, bounding guitars, lots of rhythms and singing along.

‘The Off Button’ causes me to go off the boil for a few minutes before the recently released new single ‘London’ ushers me back into the fold. Already having accumulated airplay, notably an airing on Huw Stephens’ show on Radio 1, the lyrics are pure poetry; “My heart still breaking after all these years / there’s 200 hundred miles between me and you / does London love you as much as I do?” A song about a long distance break up and sung with such raw emotion that makes you wonder if it had come straight from the heart, from bitter experience.

The aptly named ‘Home’ was played after the audience had been thanked by Kevin for coming along to make it such a special night. Clearly overwhelmed by the turnout and audience interaction afforded the band, the song oozed obvious poignancy.
Continuing with the love theme, ‘Losing Your Love’ raced along too much to be interpreted as the sad love song that the lyrics dictated. A bit of a lyric versus music conflict. By comparison, ‘Missing The Mark’ was exactly on point, a slower delivery in fitting with the sentiment of the song and the song that played them out to huge applause.

There was to be no encore, but instead a blast of Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas’ over the PA. A very merry and cheery audience then vacated the venue in search of further liquid merriment, their musical thirst quenched for the evening by their homeboys. There is no doubt that 2018 will be another busy year for Paris Youth Foundation.