Secret Show

A band that I've long been curious to see live is playing a sold-out show to some 1500 people tomorrow night--I heard about the show shortly after it was announced many months ago, but since we didn't know whether we'd be in London or Vancouver toward the end of June (we initially thought Bob's mum's surgery would take place around now, before it got pushed ahead and then back and then ahead and then back again), we didn't book ourselves into anything so far ahead. So, with these circumstances in mind, I was ecstatic to find out a few days ago that Beirut were playing a "secret" free show tonight, in advance of tomorrow's Koko show, and just days after appearing at Glastonbury. I don't know how "secret" the show ended up being, since we were two of a few hundred people who showed up at Queen Elizabeth Hall's Front Room to hear them play, but secret-or-not, it was a fantastic one-hour performance, with all the energy, personality, and infectious music that I was expecting from the band.



Led by wonderkid Zach Condon (all of 21 years old), Beirut has been described as a "Balkan pop orchestra," and the seemingly confusing description for a group of young Americans shy of an orchestra in numbers but not in ethic actually sums up their sound pretty well.