Ditch your decks, trash your guitar and trade in your bass – vocals and percussion are the only ingredients needed to make good music. “You don’t need guitars and keyboards,” claims Derek Meins aka The Agitator. “You can make powerful music without them.” Backed by ex-Maccabee drummer, Robert Dylan Thomas, Meins is on a one-man mission to prove this hypothesis, creating a wild, foot-stomping call to arms for the disenchanted.
He might scream to pounding of skins onstage but in conversation, Mein’s soft Scottish lilt belies his larger-than-life alter ego, with which he effortlessly captivates audiences, swooping energetically between rock’n’roll growls and demonic yelps. In fact, he’s got quite a box of tricks at his disposal to make up for the lack of musicians – one of them is to produce and unnerving vibrato sound by jiggling his adam’s apple with his finger.
Wondering why he calls himself The Agitator? Well, it’s a political persona designed to rouse the masses out of apathy. “Lots of people are pissed off but they don’t seem to stand up and do anything about it,” he says. “The whole idea is to get people agitated, and get them doing something about it.”
With a short back and sides, a muted brown shirt and braces Meins cuts the figure of some Orwellian malcontent, and he makes songs about modern day annoyances such as bank charges sound pretty cool. When asked is he would ever considered pulling in a guitar-slinger, he explains that he’s keener to stay with the stripped down approach. “We’re sticking to the most important parts which are the message,” he says. “The vocals and the beat.” However, he wouldn’t mind to get two drummers on stage at some point, so we can only assume that he must have had some kind of bizarre epiphany when his parents took him to see Stomp.

The Agitator is playing at The Fly, Oxford Street on the October 13