To the strains of Mahler’s Adagietto, Matty Healy has just felt himself up on a couch, taken at least two bites of a raw slab of meat, done shirtless push-ups in front of a wall of ’60s TV sets, and climbed right into one of those flickering screens.
Where does one go from there?
“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.
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.
When The Lumineers hit the big time with 2012’s inescapable Ho Hey, they were lumped in with the other bands riding the folk revival wave of the time. Their contemporaries (say Mumford & Sons and Of Monsters And Men) have since embraced Coldplay-rock, adult-oriented-pop, inoffensive electronica, and everything Imagine Dragons have ever done. But The Lumineers have stuck to their guns.
Jack White insists that fans hand in their phones before a show so they can have a “100% human experience”. Prince had men on stage armed with flashlights to blind anyone holding up their mobile. And, even less subtly, Nick Cave has been known to call out people who insist on watching the gig through a lens.
The 1975 have taken a different approach. Knowing that their average fans document their lives online, the band have devised what can only be described as the most Instagrammable arena show ever. The dextrous, genre-fluid musicians are dwarfed on three sides by giant versions of the empty picture frame that’s become an integral part of their visual identity.
Paul McCartney’s been at it for over half a century. He’s long since lost the element of surprise – yet tonight, during what’s billed as his 50th London show, that’s exactly what he delivers.
Nils van der Linden