LIVE REVIEW: Primus, Brixton Academy
Primus played the Brixton Academy on August 19th 2026
Who exactly is a Primus fan? The answer is as meandering and non-obvious as Primus themselves. Queues outside the Brixton Academy seem to contain the entire population of London, snaking for blocks around the venue, with everyone arriving early for the promise of two sets from Les Claypool’s eccentric, bass-heavy band that peaked in the early 90s, running from 8pm until curfew at 11pm. There is no one ‘type’ of person here, nor one specific demographic. Their first show in the UK for nearly a decade was upgraded from the Kentish Town Forum after selling out almost immediately, and a full UK tour was added. It suggests there are considerably more Primus fans than even the band themselves predicted.
But who are they? Unlike the Red Hot Chili Peppers and many of the other 1990s rock bands that have become increasingly entrenched as pop culture institutions, Primus are probably best known for having written the theme tune to South Park. What’s less obviously remembered is that they were genuinely huge back in the day. Sailing the Seas of Cheese broke them into the mainstream, Pork Soda reached No. 7 in the US, and in 1993 they headlined Lollapalooza. Having at some point retreated back towards the underground, with them followed a devoted, multi-generational audience whose tastes seem to range from metal to avant-garde jazz. As the turnout for this show attests, thousands of Primus fans walk anonymously among us, waiting for their moment to emerge from hiding.
The secret society feel is perhaps because Primus have always been difficult to pin down. Even Les Claypool seems faintly amused by the fact that they keep getting booked for metal festivals on this tour (they will headline Bristol’s decidedly-metal ArcTanGent a few days later). Primus aren’t really a metal band, or a funk band, or a prog band, or a punk band. They are simply Primus: bass-driven, technically absurd, experimental, funny and wilfully strange.
The show follows the same logic, feeling more like a series of loosely connected musical events than a conventional rock show. Performing behind a series of cloth medieval-style banners featuring a monkey in a top hat, Claypool would at times talk at length, then hand the microphone to new drummer John Hoffman, who has the slightly ridiculous distinction of having won Primus’s job after more than 6,100 drummers auditioned. There were long stretches of almost no conversation at all, just Claypool’s bass and Larry LaLonde’s guitar spiralling into increasingly improbable shapes. After Dirty Drowning Man, a teasing fragment of Nature Boy prompted Hoffman to admit he hadn’t actually learned it yet. It was an oddly intimate, almost anti-rock-star moment.
The whole evening was made considerably more difficult by the temperature inside Brixton Academy, which seemed to be somewhere between a sauna and the surface of the sun. Combined with the delayed start and the sheer length of the two-set format, the gig, for all its bursts of mesmerising primal joy, became something of an endurance test. When the first set suddenly ended, the interval turned into a mass migration towards the doors in search of oxygen, before everyone shuffled awkwardly back inside for another round.
And yet the strange, meandering structure somehow made sense. The conventional machinery of a night at Brixton – queues, schedules, curfews, intervals – kept colliding with Primus’s refusal to behave like everyone else.
The second set eventually gathered momentum through John the Fisherman, My Name Is Mud and Jerry Was a Race Car Driver, the latter still thumping along with the force of one of the band’s closest approximations to a hit. Then, for the encore, Claypool returned wearing a motorbike helmet covered in disco-ball mirror glass. A single light hit the back of his head and refracted across Brixton, turning him into a giant Swarovski diamond. For a moment, the whole room seemed to break apart into reflected shards of light.
It was a suitably striking way to finish a strange but striking night. Primus may have retreated from the mainstream decades ago, but somewhere along the way they seem to have built a secret society with rather a lot of members.
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