Music

Valentine’s night and I’m in Goddard’s Pie and Mash Shop on Deptford High Street with five 18-year-old men. ‘Yeah,’ one of them points out, ‘but fucking good looking 18-year-old men.’

Perhaps. However spending the night with Saul Adamczewski (lead singer), Jak Payne (guitar and vocals), Charlie Elliott (bass), Freddie Hyde-Thompson (drums) and Jo Simpson (guitar) is not, technically, romantic. More rowdy I’d say. Saul flicks green liquor gravy at me and the rest of the band guffaw. Amid the racket, Jak describes his highlight of the forthcoming tour. ‘We’re playing with Madness at a snowboard festival in Austria! I love Madness.’

The Metros also love Squeeze, Ian Dury & The Blockheads and The Specials. You can hear all this, plus The Clash and Sham 69, in songs that tip a hat to their influences but never simply rehash them. The result is a kind of newer new wave, songs of swaggering confidence about being a Peckham teenager confronted with sex, violence and Millwall home games.

The Metros live (© Adrian Pancucci)

An Austrian ski resort is a long way from this bleak stretch of south-east London where fans and band alike are enjoying the first course of the ‘night out for a tenner’ deal that gets them a meal, a drink and a gig at the Amersham Arms in New Cross. But the Madness support is a sign that things are changing for The Metros and they will change even more when their ‘Education Pt 2’ single is released on Monday March 17.

The Metros were signed to 1965 Records a year ago when they were still finishing their A-levels and, although they were delighted to get a deal, the 12 months have sucked out some of their formidable energy. ‘We’ve grown up within the record deal,’ concedes Saul. ‘That’s why, in some respects, some of the songs don’t have much relevance any more. “Education…” is about the past. Written by a different person.’

Nonetheless, after a year on £180 a week each, plus ‘40 quid a week spending money’, the band finds itself set to emerge from its south-east London confines. According to a dripping-wet, middle-class music press, the five Peckhamite tearaways specialise in working-class riotousness. Admittedly Jak does have a deep red gash on his head courtesy of a flying bottle at a gig at a squatted toilet factory in the Elephant and famously they were kicked off a tour with The Coral for spraying amplifiers with beer.

Even The Enemy, an avowedly proletarian band, said The Metros could support them if they left the building immediately after their slot. ‘Working-class heroes?’ sneers Jak. ‘We just laughed at it. It was like saying you can support our band if you go on stage with Cunt written on your forehead.’

But study the legend a little more closely and you’ll discover that Jak and Saul actually come from Bellenden Road, home of Anthony Gormley bollards, and an artisanal bakery and Freddie went to Bedales Public School; though the band excoriates him not for this stamp of inherent poshness but for living with his mum in Earl’s Court.

So, lads in search of a laugh rather than the hoodie hard men of repute. ‘We were always on the steep end of any gang-related violence,’ says Charlie, ‘but we could run fast.’ Despite those chases, The Metros are proud of the area where they came to public notice. ‘Our music is about being in south-east London,’ says Saul. ‘And when you come from a shit area there’s a feeling that you have to overcompensate, to be a bit more proud of it than if you came from somewhere else. But there’s a new scene here and we’re very close to everyone involved.’

Famously there have been other scenes in south-east London, but The Metros have no time for them: ‘The New Cross scene?’ spits Jak. ‘None of those bands are even from New Cross. Bloc Party, they’re from Chiswick.’ Incomers are resented then, but the real horror for The Metros is the prospect of the other side of the river. ‘There are just so many bands up in north London and… brrrhhh’. Saul makes a noise denoting the cold horror of having to live in the top bit of this city.

Many of The Metros’ original supporters felt the same. ‘It started in south-east London,’ says Saul, ‘but our fan base wouldn’t come and see us north of the river. So we had to make a new fan base on that side.’

‘It’s also because they’re fucking skint,’ suggests Jak, ‘they don’t go anywhere.’ Nice of the band to lay on a night out for a tenner for their original supporters, then. ‘Well,’ Jak continues, ‘don’t tell anyone, but if you paid for it all separately it costs less.’

Later that night, The Metros are an incendiary sensation, living up to Saul’s description of their live act as ‘short songs at about twice the speed’. But at the end of the gig, which includes a fist fight at the back and a performance of such egotistic, self-indulgent intensity by Saul that every young woman in the audience is physically drawn to him, some questions remain. After a year of A-level and record company limbo, where are they going to find the fire to drive them on? ‘It’s difficult to write songs the way I used to,’ admits Saul, ‘just sitting in my bedroom after school.’

Given the sort of crowd they’ll face at an Alpine snowboard fest – dimwit yahs in Ski Courchevel shirts – the thought returns: what will The Metros write about? Perhaps the Bellenden bad lads should ask their drummer.

‘Education Pt 2’ is out Mon Mar 17. The Metros also play Brixton Windmill that night.