Live review : Biffy Clyro (Birmingham & London)
11:34
The only quote that comes to mind to describe my two evenings watching Biffy Clyro is from a song by a band I miss very much : The Blackout. In Children of the Night, they sing "This is the night we said we would be fighting for".
It's been about two months of relentless fighting on my end.
God, was it worth it.
I wasn't meant to go to two shows, at first. I was just supposed to go to London, have a singalong and nicely go back home. Then, a list of things revolving around the state of my mental health, my heart and my tendency to rely on Brand New's heartbreaking numbers to numb the pain came along and drove me to Birmingham.
Funny story : I actually almost died on the way. I tend to have sleep paralysis when I fall asleep in coaches and this time, when it happened, I only woke up when I started to choke.
Let me tell you one thing I am certain of in life.
Choking to death on a Megabus to Birmingham is not the way I want to go.
Apart from the near death experience, Birmingham was pretty smooth. London, on the contrary, was more of a bumpy ride - my coach was fifty minutes late (fifty minutes that I spent waiting under the rain) and the guy who sold me my ticket turned up an hour late, resulting in me having a full on panic attack while he was having dinner and a cigarette, and missing the first two Brand New songs. As Dan said, it's never boring being me.
The evening started with American emo heroes Brand New - also known as one of my favourite bands. They've had my heart since I heard Déjà Entendu for the first time, almost five years ago, and they probably will have it forever. Seeing Brand New as a support act was a surprise - but a very welcome one.
Live, Brand New are still and storm.
Still as they are not a band who does a lot of talking, not a band who does a lot of flourish, not a band who is ever, ever going to ask you to clap or crouch and then jump.
Still as they are a band who just play and if it works, well, it works.
Still as they are a band who are who they are, no compromises, no questions asked.
Yet, they are such a violent storm, too.
Storm because them "just playing" gives out so much emotion you feel like you're rediscovering the songs, listening to them for the first time, and it's hitting you hard, once again.
Storm because them "just playing" is intense and beautiful, and it's usually live that I realise that they are one of the finest group of musicians this planet has ever carried. The live rendition of the explosive You Won't Know is the moment when Brand New's sheer genius explodes to the ears of the world.
I know I was lucky in going to Birmingham and London, crowd wise. I have read things about the awful way the Glaswegian audience has treated Brand New and how Jesse started crying, and I know how lucky I was to be surrounded by people who knew the band, who loved the band, who knew the lyrics and made their voices heard. It made my experience so much better and overall, those two days reminded me why I love Brand New that much - somewhere, in there, they're not just the band I rely on when I'm upset like some sort of angsty teenager in need of depressing lyrics. Maybe the sole reason why I run to them every time I am sad is because they're a little bit of light at the end of the darkness.
No introductions are needed when it comes to Biffy Clyro. The Scottish trio are at the top of their game, they are confirmed festival headliners (they have headlined Reading & Leeds twice, have topped the bill at T in the Park and are set to close the Saturday at Download next June) and tickets for their arena shows sell like hot cakes. Their back catalogue is just an endless collection of stadium rock anthems and stunning ballads, and calling them a household name wouldn't be too far from the truth.
Their latest tour is the occasion for Biffy Clyro to promote their latest album, 2016's Ellipsis, and it makes a whole lot of sense to open with the first song the world got to hear, Wolves of Winter. About three seconds in, when the impressive light show starts doing its thing and I find myself surrounded by up to fifteen thousand people echoing every single word, I realise that seeing Biffy Clyro live is an experience that is, somehow, overwhelming (in the best way), and, for the best part of the following two hours, every single song will be as much an explosion as the last. And that is a whole lot of explosions.
I think, quite simply put, that Biffy Clyro are one of the best live bands I have ever seen. They make playing a twenty-seven song setlist not just easy, but effortless. They master the art of going from a ballad to a heavier number like it's the simplest thing in the world. With such an extensive setlist, some bands would have a little bit of a break in the middle, just to save themselves for the encore. Biffy Clyro doesn't. They play at the very top of their game from start to finish, they give a hundred percent of everything from the first to the last second, which is something I truly admire. (Me and my terrible lung capacity would probably have collapsed to the floor after half a song, so...)
Twenty-seven songs makes for a lot of beautiful moments. There are the two guys next to me in London who sing In the Name of the Wee Man at each other like it's their very own personal song. There are the little claps in Re-Arrange being echoed by all the, it seems, hardcore fans around me, as if they were lyrics. There's Mountains, yes, I know, the most obvious track, the big one, and yet the moment I have waited for for over three years. There's my heart being shattered to pieces during Many of Horror, only to be put back together during the acoustic rendition of Machines, performed by frontman Simon Neil on some sort of little catwalk style stage. (I didn't even know it was a thing until, in Birmingham, I found myself crushed against everyone around me, turned my head and saw a microphone stand pretty much in front of my nose). There's the chaos during Living Is a Problem Because Everything Dies (dare telling me that intro isn't one of the best rock intros of the century) or closer Stingin' Belle. There's the fact that it seems impossible to be a casual Biffy Clyro fan - everyone is in it for the long haul, a hundred percent, chanting "Mon the Biff" from start to finish and singing every word in every song. On top of watching one of the world's best bands, I got to do it surrounded by an incredible crowd, and it made my experience even better. I had decided I needed to properly see Biffy Clyro live again when I'd accidentally ended up watching their Reading '13 headliner on TV and sixty thousand people (or so) singing along to Moutains on people's shoulders, surrounded by fireworks, seemed like the best thing in the world, and I can promise you, I wasn't disappointed in the slightest. Those two gigs took every single one of my expectations, threw them on the floor and stomped on them with a force beyond belief.
There are so many things I could say to show how Biffy Clyro are on their way for the stars, how they rightfully deserve their Download headline slot and how they will, for sure, become one of the biggest bands in the world very soon. They are one of these bands that make playing look organic, like it's a part of who they are, an extension of themselves. It's something you rarely see. They're something you rarely see.
One thing I want to say, though, is that seeing them live as a fan for the first times was absolute bliss. It was the first time in my life I actually cried at the end of a show - I just didn't want it to be over, I wanted to be that happy and that safe forever. At the end of the day, these two shows have made me entirely, utterly and wholeheartedly happy, they have managed to make me stop thinking about everything that was going wrong (and, believe me, that is no small feat) and they have been the pause button I had been hoping for for weeks. I want to believe it is Biffy Clyro's biggest strength : when they're on stage, the world stops, if only just for a while.
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