Electro-Swing at KOKO

November 21st, was an important day for British fans of the electro-swing band Caravan Palace. They held their first ever concert in the UK – which took place not too far from Imperial College, in the Camden KOKO venue.

Caravan Palace started off in France with three members – Vial, Payen, and Delaporte – who were originally hired to produce a soundtrack for silent porn films. They formed a group and a year later met a music producer who booked them for a series of gigs. At this point, they decided that they needed more band members, and found the rest with MySpace.

Caravan Palace define themselves as an electro-swing band. The most common type of electro-swing band is a small group of two to four members; one of which is a singer and one laptop musician who deals with loops and pre-recorded sounds. Caravan Palace are different in that most of what they play is live – aside from the base two members, they have an additional five playing live instruments (violin, clarinet, guitar, bass, trombone and even a vibraphone), and feature a stronger jazz influence than some bands – certainly as compared to Swingrowers or Bastardos Brothers (who played at last years summer ball).

They toured France for about a year before recording for their first album, called Caravan Palace too, which was released near the end of 2008. They reached #11 in the French album charts, and the success kept on coming. Their latest album, Panic, was released in the UK just two days before the concert – on the 19th November 2012. Whilst many people prefer the first album, this is still definitely worth listening to.

Upon my arrival at the concert there were few others there, although many people trying to buy spare tickets outside as it had been sold out for months. By the time the support band (Swingrowers) were on stage, the place was packed – there was barely space to move on the dance floor.

And after an enjoyable set by Swingrowers that did a good job of getting the crowd in the mood, we had to endure 15 minutes of waiting before Caravan Palace (bear in mind that at this point, myself and some others had been here for over 2 ½ hours) themselves came on – but when they did the excitement coming from the crowd was amazing.

We were treated to some great scat from Hugues Payen, the violinist, in addition to the amazing voice of Zoé Colotis and of course, I must mention the vibraphone solo that Paul-Marie Barbier treated us to early on. As it turned out, there wasn’t nearly enough space on the floor to dance properly, so a lot of people ended up moshing. That was quite unexpected, and at first I thought this wasn’t justified for a swing concert. But when listening to swing as good as that from Caravan Palace, you really can’t help but move to the beat in some way, and this was the simplest method available to most.

Unfortunately, there were problems with one song in particular, ‘Je M’amuse’, which has backing vocals but no lead singer. The band decided not to sing the backing vocals and instead had the audience sing it, but as this was played quite early on people were not so happy to join in. As a result, the song felt quite incomplete.

One other thing that caused some people problems, including the friend that I went with, was the overuse of strobe lighting, though it did make the dances look more impressive.

Overall, I have to say that the concert went by much too quickly. There was a mix of songs from both albums and the atmosphere was powerful indeed. By the end I was left wondering where the time had gone, but very glad I’d spent it there.