Last modified on Fri 15 Jan 2021 03.11 EST
The annals of rock history are packed with songs bemoaning the lot of the artist on tour. You can understand the urge to write them â they proliferate on second albums, when artists who have done almost nothing except tour since their debut search for inspiration â but, nevertheless, attempting to elicit sympathy for a rock band among people who do a proper job for a living always seems dementedly optimistic.
Under the circumstances, you have to take your hat off to London quintet Shame: whatever you make of their second album, theyâve successfully come up with an entirely new variant on a well-worn theme. Drunk Tank Pink â which takes its name from the colour that psychologists discovered automatically weakens anyone who stares at it for two minutes, and which went on to become the decor of choice in cells for intoxicated arrestees and the title of a bestselling book about how subconscious forces affect our behaviour
It’s typical. You wait a lifetime for a year off – and then two come along at once.
Or at least they did for Shame. The South London five-piece had flogged themselves half to death touring what felt like the whole world several times over in support of their debut album Songs of Praise. Interviews at the time – we’re thinking the last ever print edition of a formerly famous new music inky in particular – captured the band’s state of near collapse, frazzled beyond all existence.
Come the start of 2019, they parted ways - not as a band but as individuals, to replenish themselves in body and soul alike. Charlie Steen, their bleach haired singer and guitarist Sean Coyle-Smith visited Cuba, an experience that Steen describes as “the best holiday I’ve ever been on, and I think Sean might say the same.” The band’s bassist Josh Finerty headed east to Berlin and the other two members – drummer Charlie Forbes and guitarist Eddie Green – chilled in London.
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More than half of the citizens of this planet have non-linear lives at the moment, so putting musicians on a pedestal would be the worst kind of exceptionalism.
But even with the radical changes and breaking up of many things we’d taken for granted, for London quintet Shame it’s highly likely their path into the twenties wouldn’t have been anything like orthodox anyway.
Initially part of a grubby cabal once based around the Queen’s Head pub in Brixton (now gentrified), the then precocious teenagers were taken under the wing of various members of the Fat White Family, their 2018 debut Songs Of Praise going on to please many ears.