“I’m going to be honest,” singer Maynard James Keenan says before the final song of Tool’s first O2 Arena show. “I’m fucking tired. Being 58, thinking you’re 48, pretending you’re 28, it’s fucking hard work.”
The thing is, he doesn’t seem tired. And he doesn’t make it look like hard work — although even an 18-year-old would struggle to make it through the two-hour performance Tool’s just given.
“Might start writing a record & making soap,” Yannis Philippakis tweeted in March 2020, just a few days before England went into lockdown. While there’s no news on the Foals singer-guitarist’s range of bath bombs, that record is now imminent. Called Life Is Yours, it’s due next month with early reports throwing around descriptions like “euphoric”, “sunny”, and even “best of their career”.
Ghost’s new album, Impera, is partly about the rise of empires. It’s something they know a little about. Just over a decade ago, their debut LP didn’t even trouble the UK charts; their latest debuted at Number Two. On their last visits to London, pre-pandemic, they played at Royal Albert Hall and Wembley Arena; tonight they’re at the city’s largest indoor music venue, The O2.
The basement is hot. Britt Daniel and Alex Fischel have had a long day. They’re playing to around 30 people who haven’t even paid to be there. And yet the Spoon duo are giving it their all.
But that’s always been the band’s approach to live performance: crank up the intensity of their studio recordings so they sound more visceral, more direct, more emotional.
Recording a new album after almost 30 years is, in a word, risky. Will it be good enough to match your classics? Will it be similar enough for diehard fans to like it? Will it be different enough to keep them interested? Will anyone else even notice it’s out?
Performing said album live from start to finish to a crowd who’ve never heard it before is, in a word, insane.
Gigs, they say, should start with a bang. Literal pyrotechnics, epic walk-on music, a high-speed hit song, even a straightforward city-based greeting are all designed to grab an audience’s attention right away.
Someone forgot to tell IDLES. Or the band just didn’t listen. Either way, they’ve come up with something even more effective.
If you call your band Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, you’re not really going to be serving up subtlety. And so it is for this Newcastle five-piece, who apply the same more-is-more approach of their name to their music and live performances.
It’s in Matt Baty’s roar as he delivers lyrics about everything from self-esteem to religion. It’s in the brutal tectonic riffs laid down by guitarists Sam Grant and Adam Sykes in Black Sabbath-on-steroids anthems like Halloween Bolson. It’s in the unflinching rhythms of drummer Chris Morley and bassist Johnny Hedley that make the group sound like a marching herd of mastodons, right from the very opening beats of show-starter Reducer.
“I never thought I’d be sitting here in London, shouting into a microphone about worms,” admits Sebastian Murphy from Electric Ballroom’s stage.
He’s not the only one. Superficially, at least, Viagra Boys’ rise from the Stockholm punk scene seems surprising. There’s that name. There are the lyrics: Worms does what it says on the tin; one of the band’s biggest songs has Murphy listing various sports. There are the sax solos. There’s the keytar. There’s the sense that they’re just taking the piss.
Just Enough Education To Perform was, recounts Kelly Jones, a massive album for The Stereophonics. It reached number one in the UK charts not just once, but twice. It went six times platinum. It resulted in three young Welshmen headlining Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage and touring America with U2.
“It was all police escorts and helicopters at that time,” he tells a sold-out Shepherd’s Bush Empire.
You need guts to play a song immortalised by Jimi Hendrix. You need talent to pull it off. You need charisma to make it your own. Ayron Jones has all three in spades. And that’s how he can also take on Purple Rain as if it’s just another song.
But, as impressive as his renditions are, the singer-guitarist hasn’t come all the way to London to play cover versions. The 35-year-old’s debut UK gig is all about showcasing new album Child Of The State. His third LP, but first on a major label, is stuffed with the blues-infused, grunge-tinted hard rock you might expect from a musician born and raised in Seattle. In other words, it’s packed with songs meant to be played loud and live.
Nils van der Linden