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.
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.
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.
“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”.
Bloc Party: Alpha Games
Bloc Party’s Alpha Games is an album of our times. No, it’s not yet another rumination on the sociological, existential, and mental health impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s not that reductive. Instead, the 12 unflinching tracks carry an underlying sense of discomfort, unease, dread; that low-level feeling surely everybody’s had over the past five years that something’s not quite right. The only relief is provided by moments of despair, outbursts of rage, and sparkles of beauty.
Trent Reznor is now a married, 57-year-old father of five who won his second Oscar for soundtracking a Pixar film. But he’s always been more than your average rock musician. And, as evidenced by Nine Inch Nails’ 2018 offering Bad Witch and the group’s still incendiary live shows, he’s also retained the conflicting brutality, insecurity, aggression, and pained beauty of his finest work: 1994’s The Downward Spiral.
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.
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Unlimited Love
In some ways, Unlimited Love is more than just another Red Hot Chili Peppers release. It’s their first in a decade recorded with producer Rick Rubin. More importantly, it’s their first since 2006 to feature John Frusciante. His replacement, Josh Klinghoffer, is clearly a talented musician. On 2011’s I’m With You, he ably channelled the mercurial guitarist, while 2016’s more experimental The Getaway made him an integral part of producer Danger Mouse’s sonic palette.
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.
Nils van der Linden