Emperor Yes & Friends at Top Office Machines

Emperor Yes were a very new band in the summer of 2012. The London trio, Ash Gardner, Hugo Sheppard (formerly of Summer Camp) and the Three Trapped Tigers drummer Adam Betts, had only started playing live that year, and their songs about space, animals and ancient Egypt had so far reached people mostly through word of mouth. Gardner and Sheppard had written the first songs apart, one in Tokyo and the other in London, before meeting in Bali early in 2011 to record demos, and two of those demos became Wasps and Fishes. Their answer to the problem of how to launch a record was to hand it to a roomful of visual artists first.

The show

Emperor Yes and Friends opened on Thursday 5 July at Top Office Machines, 133-135 Bethnal Green Road, an old office-equipment shop a short walk from Shoreditch High Street station. Eighteen artists took part. Each was given the two songs from the forthcoming single and asked to make a piece in response.

The line-up leaned towards the East London street and illustration scene. The Low Bros, the German brothers whose animal-headed figures in tracksuits were turning up on walls across Europe, contributed. So did Malarky, known for his cheerful cartoon characters, and Mr Penfold, whose flat, bright abstract shapes were becoming a familiar sight around East London. Billy, Milo Tchais and Paul Shinn were also on the list.

Mr Penfold went beyond the wall. For the opening he designed a short run of personalised Emperor Yes and Friends bottle labels for Hackney Brewery, which supplied the beer on the night.

Three weeks of everything else

The exhibition stayed up for three weeks, and the band filled that time with an unusually mixed programme. There was stand-up comedy, a workshop on developing photographs, a magician and a 3D photo booth. Gbenga Adelekan of Metronomy played a DJ set. There was also an evening under the Sceptics in the Pub banner, the long-running series of informal science talks, asking whether it is true that sharks do not get cancer, with Ben Howard as the guest speaker. It is a claim that circulates widely and is false: sharks do get tumours.

It was a modest show, but a sensible idea for a band without a big label behind it. A single is hard to turn into an evening out; a room of new work by artists with their own followings is not, and East London had no shortage of those.

The single itself, the band’s first, was still to come. The artwork got there before the music did.