Live Review: Shanghai Blues - Camden Assembly, London 11/01/2018

January is always that time of the year where the top new band lists come out, who is the fresh new act to check out, and who are going to be the biggest names on the scene by the end of 2018. Dominating many of them this year is London four piece Shanghai Blues, who are driving the fresh energy of guitar music back into the industry. We caught them tearing apart a jam packed Camden Assembly this month. 

Shanghai Blues crash into their track 'Tense' with a new level of energy, feeding off the busy room of people moving and dancing to their music. With many parts of the room singing along to the song shows the band have a decent following already on their home turf. Following on from that with 'Run', with its big chorus sending the venue into a frenzy.

They throw themselves around the stage, as if restricted by the size of it, showing they need a bigger space for their sound, as clearly from this that is where they are going, bigger venues and bigger stages.

The best part of Shanghai Blues is the songs they have in their arsenal, tracks like 'Those Three Words', a song that grows from a simple guitar song to an arena filling beast. New tracks like 'Lies' and 'Fall' show us that the band are cooking up something special for 2018, but encoring with recently single 'Swim' after having 'ONE MORE SONG! ONE MORE SONG!' shouted back at them from the crowd ends the evening on a massive applause.

You constantly hear the line 'guitar music is dead', but maybe it isn't. Maybe all it needed was Shanghai Blues.

Words and Photography by Ant Adams