For a band as creative as St Albans’ own electronic-hardcore-rock fusion pioneers, Enter Shikari, the last thing you would expect them to do is sit on their hands.
Great bands’ output can, famously, be predicated by the intense interaction between members, often between a central creative pairing. This can be a harmonious mutuality but, more often, music is built from tension, from difference, from the frisson between two individuals.
There was a point in this stadium spectacular when P!nk gave her fans two choices. They could either “make out with their partners or go queue for a beer” she suggested, prior to one of the first slow-paced numbers of the evening, but the latter choice was a dangerous one. Few shows, even among big pop jamborees, feature as much going on as Alecia Moore’s current Summer Carnival jaunt.
Having propelled to stardom with their debut album Night Visions back in 2012, the Nevada pop-rock giants Imagine Dragons have reigned supreme on charts and airwaves.
She has one of the most distinctive voices in folk and contemporary British music, impossible to forget once heard, and impossible to ignore. Even – or especially – as Linda Peters, singing, aptly enough, “I’ll Show You How to Sing” on a fairly obscure 1968 single with Paul McNeill.
Out on the perimeters where there are no stars, in a void full of bong-smoke and synesthetic noise… there, in a greasy biker hovel full of gigantic amps, there live Wytch Pycknyck. Some say that place is called Hastings. Whatever it’s called, this four-piece arrive to reinvigorate heavy rock with a demented energy, zigzagged to the gills with lysergic spirit and a belief in gutter-punk rock’n’roll.
The current trend for package tours with two headliners appears to be growing, and this jaunt presented somewhat unlikely bedfellows – the theatrical angst of Billy Corgan’s crew and Rivers Cuomo’s indie trendsetters united by a shared love for guitar histrionics, 90s nostalgia for those who remember MTV2 and not much else.
VINYL OF THE MONTH
Ariel Sharratt & Matthias Kom Never Work (BB*Island) + Ella Ronen The Girl With No Skin (BB*Island)
Towards the end of the encore, Deap Vally bring on their friend Solon Bixler. Frontwoman Lindsey Troy hands him her guitar. Despite this being their farewell tour, these two songs, she tells us, are new. The duo, now briefly a trio, go ballistic, a punk rock explosion ensues. Drummer Julie Edwards attacks her kit like Animal from The Muppets, Troy stomps like a glam rock loon before rolling about the floor, and Bixler scissor-kicks his way to stand aloft the bass drum.
They’re burning with the right stuff. They have been all night.
Any Richard Thompson appearance comes with a hallmark guaranteeing quality produce – be that an album or a stage show.
Indeed, Thompson's 75th birthday concert will land on 8 June at the Royal Albert Hall, with a dazzling range of musical guests to rival the same venue’s epic 70th birthday bash five years ago. Meanwhile, it’s been six years since his last album, 13 Rivers, an album he described on its release as “coming to me as a surprise in a dark time”.