Category: Live Reviews

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Live Reviews Music

Tremonti offer more than musical bodyslams

Alter Bridge bandmates Myles Kennedy and Mark Tremonti must be really competitive. Or maybe they just don’t like sitting around the house. Kennedy, the group’s singer and rhythm guitarist, doubles up on those roles for Slash while nurturing a burgeoning solo career. Lead guitarist Tremonti, who co-founded Creed and co-wrote hits like the Grammy-winning With Arms Wide Open, has recently teamed up with members of Frank Sinatra’s orchestra to sing Ol’ Blue Eyes standards. Oh, and for the past decade, he’s fronted Tremonti.

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Live Reviews Music

Jack White’s evolution continues

When Jack White joined his first group, Goober & The Peas, playing drums was just part of the gig. They dressed like Grand Ole Opry cowboys, so he was forced to wear the whole Hank Williams getup, from the Nudie suit to the 10-gallon hat. It wasn’t an easy fit for a kid from Detroit. But White soon realised that the band were getting noticed purely because they’d swapped out the predominant uniform of jeans and T-shirt. At that point in the early ’90s he learned that, even through something as innocuous as an outfit, he could decide what message he wanted to project.

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Live Reviews Music

Red Hot Chili Peppers still giving it away, now

Red Hot Chili Peppers have just played a swaggering Give It Away. They’ve walked off to do whatever it is they do before the encore. A few roadies move some equipment around. The cameras that have been covering the action on stage turn to the audience.

The two big screens show a sea of waving arms; close-ups of sweaty, smiling, sunburnt faces; self-conscious giggles; people who still have enough energy after 90 minutes of jumping and screaming to jump and scream some more.

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Live Reviews

Twenty One Pilots’ London takeover intensifies

Twenty One Pilots are not short on ideas.

Let’s begin with their current Takeover tour that’s, well, taken over London this week. Instead of putting on one blowout at, say, The O2 Arena, the duo are building up to Wembley Arena by playing increasingly larger venues across the city. Yesterday it was Camden Assembly (that holds 400 punters), tonight Shepherd’s Bush Empire (2,000), before graduating to Brixton Academy (5,000) and, finally, the 12,500-capacity arena next to Wembley Stadium. It’s a good marketing idea that keeps the Twenty One Pilots name out there for more than one night. More importantly, it lets the band reconnect with diehard fans — one who told our photographer that he’s been queuing outside the venue since Monday morning — even though it can’t have been easy to downscale this hyperkinetic, hypervisual show.

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Live Reviews

Sharon Van Etten uplifts at Brixton Academy

For Sharon Van Etten, live shows are all about “feeling connection and sharing energy“. You’d think that would be a priority for all performers. But, by the time they can headline venues as big as Brixton Academy, many prefer efficiency. At the level where the lighting cues are seemingly as important as the music, passion is replaced by precision, off the cuff chat by carefully rehearsed dialogue.

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Live Reviews

Interpol turn up the urgency at Roundhouse

“Fuck yeah!” grins Paul Banks. Interpol have just played a blistering rendition of PDA — greeted with riotous bouncing, moshing, and a persistent crowd surfer upfront — to end the main set of a thrilling Roundhouse gig. It’s a show that almost never happened. Yesterday, only 45 minutes before the venue doors were set to open, the band tweeted: “Due to illness, we sadly have to cancel tonight’s show—it is our intention that tomorrow’s show will go ahead—we greatly apologize for the late nature of this announcement.”

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Live Reviews

Pat Metheny gives Hammersmith the Side-Eye

On stage, Pat Metheny’s almost always stationary. He’s either looking down, face obscured by hair, coaxing his Ibanez PM signature model to sing with impossible beauty. Or he’s sitting, finger-picking an acoustic guitar with the utmost precision and grace.

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Live Reviews

Crowded House are still dreaming

More than a decade’s passed since I last saw Crowded House live. It was October 2010, according to setlist.fm, in an arena at a Cape Town casino. The band played well, and the songs sounded good. But the most memorable part of the show was the warm, casual vibe they created in a venue with all the charm of an aircraft hangar.

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Live Reviews Music

The Flaming Lips bring peace, love, and giant inflatables

The Flaming Lips have a reputation to uphold. Legend has it they were signed after a record label rep caught a show where they almost burnt down the venue “with some questionable on-stage pyrotechnics”. They came up with the “headphone concert” more than 20 years ago, transmitting their live performance to audiences wearing headphones. They’ve released music on flash drives embedded inside gummies, a 24-hour song streamed on a non-stop loop, and one album across four discs intended to be played simultaneously.

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Live Reviews Music

Jeff Beck makes the sublime look effortless

On Jeff Beck’s first day recording Roger Waters’ album Amused To Death, the story goes, he showed up with a distortion pedal in his back pocket and an unplayed signature Fender ripped out of a cardboard box moments earlier. “You got an amp?” he asked. Didn’t need anything else. Just plugged in and played.

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