KOKO was humming before the lights even dipped – a restless, anticipatory thrum ricocheting off the deep red walls and ornate balconies. But the first act of the evening wasn’t about chaos or reinvention. It was about pure, distilled Frenchness…. ooh la la.
Melanie Pain drifted onto the stage like a chanson whispered into Le Bal Blomet at closing time. If she didn’t arrive in a Citroën 2 CV with a baguette under one arm, the illusion still held: she carried the room with that ineffable, cinematic French aura – equal parts sighing melancholy and playful mystery.
It felt as if she’d cracked open a skylight in KOKO’s opulent domed ceiling straight through to Montmartre. Joined by guitar and bass and surrounded by candlelight, every breath, every tilt of her head was so impossibly French it bordered on parody – and yet she was too effortless, too luminous, for it to be anything but authentic.
Midway through, the theatre softened into a collective swoon. We were transported straight into one of those tiny Soho jazz hideaways – the kind Florence Joelle could summon with a single sultry trill – candlelit, illicitly smoky, conspiratorial. For a few blissful minutes, KOKO stopped being a Victorian music hall and became a boîte à musique where even time slowed its pulse to match hers.
When she slipped offstage like the last curl of smoke from a Gauloises, the room was primed: softened, bewitched, ready to be reshaped.
Then the lights dimmed again, and Nouvelle Vague emerged in seductive film noir – monarchs of the shadows, serene, sly, and carrying that strange magic they’ve honed for decades. The crowd exhaled as though permission had been granted to fall under the spell again.
Like stepping out from some Jean-Pierre Melville cinematography, they opened with Love Will Tear Us Apart, transformed from its frostbitten origins into a warm, aching tango. We were utterly transfixed, and suddenly the familiar wasn’t familiar at all – it was seductive, slow-burning, almost too intimate to witness.
From there, the set unfurled in soft focus, drifting from one reimagined relic to the next: People Are People recast for barefoot dancing in a Paris loft, Only You delivered as a fragile confession trembling at the edges, Making Plans for Nigel cheeky and clipped with its delightfully off-kilter grin, and This Is Not a Love Song sashaying past with a wink, a smirk, a sly rhythmic shrug. Girls on Film followed – Duran Duran dipped in honey and left to marinate – before the shadows lengthened and A Forest, a standout favourite, drifted through the room like ghost perfume, the band glowing in gothic restraint, all velvet and smoke.
When I mentioned in the 1st 3 office that Nouvelle Vague were playing KOKO, the reactions were a predictable chorus of, “Wow, are they still going?” and “They do all those covers, right?” Well, I can now officially retort: their talent isn’t mere reinterpretation – it’s transmutation. They take songs etched into the post-punk genome and coax out the melodies hiding beneath the noise, offering us what might have been if Bauhaus and The Cure had grown up drinking caipirinhas on a Brazilian beach. Go on, imagine…
The energy kicked up, slick and breathless, as they tumbled into the riotous heart of the set, each song beading on the night like the sweat of lovemaking on alabaster skin: Teenage Kicks bubbling with champagne fizz, Should I Stay or Should I Go unfolding as a lovers’ quarrel whispered behind a curtain, Just Can’t Get Enough rising like a serotonin sunrise, and the glorious She’s in Parties slinking through the room – decadent, divine, irresistible. The Guns of Brixton swaggered in, rebellion recast as a slow, knowing smirk, before they unveiled their crown jewel of mischievous reinvention: Too Drunk to Fuck – the Dead Kennedys via midnight velvet lounge, outrageous, hilarious, perfect. And then, breath spent and pulse softened, they began to wind the night down with Shout, transmuted from a primal scream into something far more intimate, a final tremor in the dark. to a fragile implosion – and finally I Melt With You, closing the evening with the very softest kiss of nostalgia.
KOKO, you sultry, sexy mistress, you morphed into a sex-soaked dreamscape, a theatre of forbidden velvet shadows and reimagined memories, where punk melted into bossa, angst unfurled into elegance, and chaos sashayed effortlessly into charm; it shouldn’t work, it has no right to work, and yet under Nouvelle Vague’s intoxicating touch it blooms, glows, and breathes with impossible beauty – a night of alchemy, we say, pure and simple.
NOUVELLE VAGUE / MÉLANIE PAIN played KOKO on Thu 27 Nov 2025
