Why aren’t Spoon filling stadiums?

Here’s a mystery for you. Why were Spoon, one of the most dynamic, sharpest rock bands in the world, playing a single night in a north London town hall (capacity 890) while Arctic Monkeys were playing three nights at Arsenal’s ground (capacity 59,000) as part of a UK tour that encompassed eight other stadiums in the UK, plus one arena, one park and Glastonbury? It’s not that Arctic Monkeys aren’t good – no one gets that kind of critical unanimity without being good. It’s just that Spoon are better, and better than almost everyone else.

So why aren’t Spoon filling stadiums? First, they rarely come to the UK. They do big rooms in America where they’ve had number one albums, but for many years their albums were hard to come by here so there wasn’t much point touring. Second, they’re called Spoon, which is a terrible name for a band. Third, they seem a bit sensible. There’s nothing very wild about Spoon – they are now middle-aged men for whom this is a serious job. For many years the biggest story about them was that they were the best-reviewed group in the world, according to the review aggregations site Metacritic. Fourth, they’re perhaps a bit too good.

Spoon are a simple group: their songs are spare, sometimes skeletal, melodic, energetic. And onstage in London, aided by a genius sound engineer who made every single thing that happened count, they were perfection. Every tap of the hi-hat, every brush of a keyboard, every twang of guitar was as clear as quartz. Nothing was lost in a morass of sound. It was a chance to marvel not just at the usual suspects – the guitarists Alex Fischel, Gerardo Larios and Britt Daniel (also the singer and songwriter) – but at the drummer, Jim Eno.