Live review: Danko Jones plus Tuk Smith and the Restless Hearts at Le Trabendo, Paris on Thursday, December 4 2025
By STEVE MASCORD
YOUR correspondent could count on one hand the number of gigs he’s been to in Paris over the years. The Cramps at L’Élysée Montmartre in ’94, The Cult at Le Zenith three years earlier, someone else at the same venue a decade later (oh dear, I just disappeared down a Last.fm rabbit hole for a second).
So it was exciting in my middle age to be negotiating a wet Parisian evening with Google Maps, looking for Le Trabendo somewhere behind a giant Philharmonic Hall. Didn’t find it initially so with the wife in tow, we went down the left side of the concert hall instead of the right, with a Christmas market occupying most of the adjacent park and there it was, over a little Japanese garden-style bridge.
Le Trabendo is a red, arty looking building in an area which you might compare to the old Darling Harbour around the EntCent, before that was all razed. It’s very airy – read cold – inside but one of those rare venues with a 180 degree view of the stage.
My real interest here is Tuk Smith and the Restless Hearts. Tuk is the former singer of The Biters and he’s a fiercely independent purveyor of what we now call classic rock – a lover of Petty and Thin Lizzy and Cheap Trick. From a recording perspective, there really aren’t any Restless Hearts – he does everything.
Now before I go any further, the French LOVE rock’n’roll. You know it from watching the 1980 documentary, Let There Be Rock. The Angels’ Rick Brewster once recounted a Paris crowd SINGING his solos and crying. So it’s no surprise Le Trabendo is well populated by the time Tuk comes on.
If you’ve ever admired an artist from afar and seen them for the first time, you’ll know things can go one of two ways. They either live up to your internal hype or they don’t. This was definitely a case of the former. Tuk’s young enough for the now-second-nature concerns we have over vocals to be a non-issue.
The songs are unfailingly catchy. He gets the crowd involved during “Running With The Wild Ones” and admits to having ripped off Thin Lizzy for “East Side Girls”. He makes perfect rock shapes, his band have haircuts that have kept many a Nashville snipper fed and watered. And he throws everything into it.
My highlight is “Ain’t For The Faint”, the riffiest of his repertoire. This life ain’t for the faint-hearted, especially when you get kicked off The Stadium Tour by Motley Crue and Def Leppard.
Now, I thought the assembled throng was into Tuk. Before Danko Jones comes on, a few beefy fellows elbow their way to our vicinity in front of the mic stand. One guy just looks at me, smiling and shrugging, as if to say ’surely things are going to be more fun than this’. It’s only later that I translated this look however … later when that guy, his mate and someone else slam into my wife and I have to drag her to safety.
Before that, Danko hit the stage with the force of the Toronto Raptors slam dunking on your head. Bassist John Calabrese is whirling and grinning, drummer Rich Knox is bashing away and Danko is spitting out that lascivious garagey street poetry.
They open with “What You Need” off current record Leo Rising, which for a band of their longevity may seem a gutsy move. But you know what? It’s perfect because Leo Rising is Danko Jones’ best record.
The issue with the trio over the years, to my ears, is that each album has had a little too much filler and if you listened to them long enough, things would start to sound samey – including in the live setting.
Tonight’s setlist is masterfully formulated to avoid that pitfall and when we retire to side-stage (where our pics make us look like we’re guests of the band) we can see the feral impact this gut-punch rock’n’roll is having on the locals.
The pit is … no place for the feint hearted! Guess I wouldn’t deal with being ‘kicked out of the stadium’ as well as Tuk has.
An encore of “Guess Who’s Back”, “Lovercall” and “My Little RnR” brings things to a close and I can’t remember a better show I’ve seen in Paris (albeit I can’t even remember who one of the others was), a better performance from Danko who I’ve bee watching for a couple or decades or a more fun night out this year.
We head to a kebab restaurant – not shop, a kebab restaurant with about 50 options – with a new friend, a 23-year-old Austrian student who was there mainly to see Tuk. He’s about the age I was when I first came to Paris and for once, I am optimistic about the hundred of rock concerts he has ahead of him.
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