Antony Szmierek (smeh-rik) is excited to be here. As well he might: less than two years ago he was still working as an English teacher, and tonight he’s playing to a sold-out Leadmill. After this he’ll set off on a jaunt of 20 more mostly sold-out dates across Europe, with a quick pit stop at SXSW Festival in Texas. It’s also his first solo tour as a ‘proper’ musician – no more Mr. Szmierek – and so when he says he’s excited you can tell he genuinely means it.
So, tonight is a celebration, and Szmierek himself is imploring the crowd to lose themselves in the moment, if only for a few hours. It’s an attitude atypical of his hedonistic dance music, which fuses spoken word street poetry with Balearic-kissed bass and hands-in-the-air choruses. If that sounds like it shouldn’t work, then you’re absolutely right: it shouldn’t. But it absolutely does.
Though his music is more dance-minded, Szmierek comes from that fine Northern line of literary-minded songwriters. You can hear echoes of Cocker and Turner in his smart and sardonic lyrics, which tackle everything from misguided late nights in Dance Better (‘Got the Sunday scaries on a Saturday night / Tryna fight the strobe lights like they cut me up in traffic’) to misguided mid-90s construction projects in The Great Pyramid of Stockport (‘Stockport council abandoned their valley of the kings / but I’ll never abandon you’).
(In the latter tune, as Szmierek speak-sings ‘Imagine what the Pharaohs could have done / with a four-day working week and a three-fingered Twix,’ he gets a packet of Twix chucked at him from the crowd. Now that’s poetry in motion.)
Szmierek’s song titles may suggest hedonism (The Afters, Twist Forever, Dance Better), and his lyrics often verge into silliness (in Yoga Teacher: ‘On this musty borrowed PE foam mat / I’m a downward-facing class traitor’), but there’s a dark undercurrent running through his music. He sings of being caught up in a fight in his own mind and only getting older, never wiser. Yet each time these dark thoughts threaten to overcome his psyche, they’re punctured by burst-of-light lyrics that bring him (and us) back down to earth: a mention of The Simpsons at 6 here, a reminder that tomorrow will be brighter there. It’s at these points when his music starts to make the most sense, and when the Leadmill crowd really start to connect with it.
And it’s maybe that contrast which makes Szmierek so relatable, so popular, and, well, so good. At one point, Szmierek writes, directs and stars in a smash hit mosh pit – ‘the first ever poetry mosh pit.’ A couple of songs later, he’s almost brought to tears during an emotional rendition of ‘Restless Leg Syndrome.’ Inbetween, he’s belting out a faintly-ludicrous cover of Robbie Williams’ ‘Feel,’ which just works, and I do not have the words to explain why exactly it does.
So when Szmierek closes the show by imploring the crowd into an early-March New Year’s countdown before ‘The Words to Auld Lang Syne,’ it somehow makes sense, again. ‘All the little things that you needed,’ sings the song’s refrain. ‘All the tiny pieces will fall into place.’ It’s a fitting summary of where Szmierek stands now – and you can’t help but feel just as excited as he is. All the best, Mr. Szmierek.
