Maximo Park and the Cribs at the Record Bar

Maximo Park and the Cribs

Better Than: The Arctic Monkeys accepting your friend request.

Review by Jason Harper. Photos by Scott Spychalski.

How are people going to know about it if it’s a secret show?

That was the crux of the biscuit going into the Record Bar’s free Secret MySpace Show last night, where upwardly mobile British bands the Cribs and Maximo Park were shedyuled to play before an all-ages crowd comprising kids who could have only heard about the show through their MySpace membership. (Well, or by looking at the RB ad in this week’s Pitch, or reading about it on this blog, or whatever.)

I arrived at 6 p.m., an hour before show time, hoping to see a ridiculously long line of MySpace chitlins waiting at the door. Instead, they were all on Facebook. Infiltration!

Just kidding. Actually and somewhat unsurprisingly, no one was lined up outside the door. The situation was a bit scary for me because as both a music scene advocate and an Anglophile, I wanted the show to be successful.

In the bar’s basement, chipper Maximo Park singer Paul Smith was biding his time in the sweltering-hot green room, fiddling with iTunes on his Mac laptop. He was in a very positive mood, saying that even if only a hundred people showed up to his middle-America club show it was OK as long as they reached just one person. “I used to be that hundredth person,” he said referring to his own youth, when he’d witnessed cool, underground shows in his hometown of Billingham, England. I was wondering how he’d react when only 13 or so people showed up to see his band play Kansas City.