Gig Review and Photos by Dawn

There's a lyric on Maximo Park's new album which runs "I threw my body into its actions". Watching frontman Paul Smith hurl himself around the Academy stage in a somewhat unhinged fashion of which Tim Booth would be proud, never have a band's words seemed quite so apt.

Returning to Newcastle for the first of two homecoming shows (although let's just get straight once and for all that, although the band formed there, Paul was actually born and bred in Teesside, not Tyneside) the band look genuinely thrilled by the roof-raising racket generated by a sell-out crowd as they open with Graffiti and two tracks from new LP Quicken the Heart – Wraithlike and The Penultimate Clinch.

Not content to let Paul provide all the energy, Lukas Wooller also spends a good deal of the evening bouncing around – at least, as much as his keyboard playing will allow. Paul, meanwhile, spends much of Books in Boxes prowling the stage like a panther about to go in for the kill. When he's not wielding the microphone stand like his weapon of choice, he's also prone to alternating between a slightly camp hip wiggle, or jogging on the spot à la David Byrne.