Taking to the London stage armed with only one’s ukulele is a risky plan. George Formby was probably the last person to pull off that trick successfully until Beirut’s Zach Condon did a solo encore at his first London performance. It’s unusual to see an untested band receive such a warm welcome or such an insistent demand for them to carry on playing. He managed it without a single double entendre though. I’m not making this up but the ukulele is making a big comeback in young French bands.

Any band that has a song called “My Family’s Role in the World Revolution” already has some credit in the bank on this site. If you watch the video of Beirut’s  song “Elephant Gun” and don’t fall in love with it you are either deaf or bereft of any finer human feeling. Reliable sources tell me that not liking that song is an essential requirement for being allowed to join right wing Colombian death squads. Beirut are capable of greatness.

Their album Gulag Orkestar could serve perfectly well as the soundtrack for remastered Bulgarian or Romanian 1930s films despite having been recorded in Albuquerque. The follow up March of the Zapotec takes them closer to home and is based on the music of Oaxaca. These are not the ingredients that typically help bands sell out a show in London but the Forum was packed with people who must have spent the last year or so closeted in their bedrooms waiting for the moment to see if anyone else liked this sort of music. Live it sometimes worked better than on record and on a few occasions even prompted pairs of young lovers near me to start romantically dancing. Ahh, bless.

For a musician still in his early twenties this was an astonishing show. It pulled together musical themes from Mexico, France, central Europe and Anglo-American pop. The configuration of musicians was distinctive with three horn players – two of whom doubled on other instruments, an accordionist, drummer and bassist. Occasionally the amalgam was a bit creaky and overly cerebral. Those are the bits when it did not quite work. Most of the time it was uplifting and perversely creative even if the influences were just too obvious. The “d’oh” moment was an ill-judged version of Serge Gainsbourg’s “La Javanaise”. It suddenly clicked that his songwriting owed much more to the French tradition than pop. The transplantation does not always work. If Zach happens to read this my advice is drop the song from the set and include the Jane Birkin version in the selection playing in the interval. It went down a storm at my wedding.