It must be said that the woman next to me is busy buying something on Vinted. While my mate next to me, on the other side says to me, at one point in The Armed’s set: “Why did it take seven people to make such a noise?”
What you would expect from a band that doesn’t even say who their members are.
The whole thing is ever-changing and never, actually, officially says who’s in the band. You can expect something like you’ve never heard before.
“Fortune’s Daughter”, according to singer Adam – or it could be Tony or whatever name he’s going by this week – because that’s The Armed. The guys staying in the Ibis Budget Hotel in the Gay Village in Birmingham, to which they even dedicate a song.
Then you get “Local Millionaire”, its Strokes-style pulse garnished with nightmare, a frenzy, and “On Jupiter”.
They hang it on, according to them, in the chorus, and the only thing you can really say is: what on earth have we just watched? The band themselves know it. “Thanks for sticking with us.”
But really, where would The Armed belong? Nowhere. And that’s what makes them special. Or at least that’s what makes them special in my book.
“All Things Bright and Beautiful” opens the set, and if that drags you straight back to school assemblies, that’s very much the point. What follows is a sharp, funny, furious tour of modern Britain.
“I’m the nicest dickhead you’ll ever meet,” comes the declaration – or maybe the shout – and it’s a perfect tone-setter. Singer/drummer Louis Holman – maybe Phil Collins was an inspiration?- clearly doesn’t care whether the room bends to their will or not.
If “Mirror Muscles” flirts with metal, then “Fuck the Hi-Hat” is unmistakably their own, before the crowd-meeting chaos really kicks in. Laurie Vincent wanders into the audience, talking to everyone, and when he asks if there are any vapers in the house, he dedicates “Act Violently” with the beautifully direct phrase: “This one’s for you pricks.”
And yet this is really clever stuff. It’s high-impact punk, but not thick punk. “Punk’s Dead” lands not as a slogan but as a knowing provocation.
There’s a noise running through the set that channels something deeply familiar – frustration, humour, defiance – whether that comes from small towns in the south of England or right here in the Midlands. “Girl Fight” is played twice, specifically to allow the women in the crowd to have their own mosh pit, and the room responds accordingly.“Beauty Quest” teeters on the edge of collapse, the kind of moment that recalls the days when gigs felt like they might go wrong at any second – and that’s exactly what makes it exciting.
They close with “The Hunter”, suggesting that looking directly at the sun is a terrible idea. It probably is. But as a metaphor for the band itself, it’s perfect: reckless, confrontational, impossible to ignore.
You come away with the sense that Soft Play are exactly what they need to be. If the story goes that no one else wanted to join the band and that’s why they were a two-piece, then maybe that’s the point — and that’s their loss.
Biffy Clyro are roughly a third of the way into their set when they play “Wolves of Winter” and the streamers go off, as they do at any proper arena show. And yet, if this is a big arena rock moment, it somehow feels both typical and atypical all at the same time.
Because for all the bombast, the storming choruses and the ease with which they pull lots and lots of people into the room, there’s still something else at the heart of what Biffy do. A thread of self-doubt. A sense of reflection. A feeling that none of this was ever a given.
As Simon Neil sings, “We have achieved so much more than you possibly thought we could.”
That comes through most clearly in moments like “A Little Love”, played bathed in red light, the band reduced to silhouettes behind nets, before much of the set draws from last September’s album. “Hunting Season” sounds vast, but it’s “That Golden Rule” – from sixteen years ago now – that really detonates the place, a reminder that these songs have aged as well as the band themselves.
There’s humour too. Simon Neil shining a torch into the audience during “Who’s Got a Match?” while announcing, “You can tell I mean business – I’ve got a torch.” Later, during “Shot One”, he stands high above the stage, almost surveying what he’s built over three decades with the Johnston brothers.
James Johnston isn’t here tonight, Naomi Macleod stepping in on bass, but the spirit of the band remains intact. “Space”, “Tiny Indoor Fireworks” and “Friendshipping” – the latter dedicated to James – underline just how naturally Biffy write songs that feel athletic, emotional and immediate
What’s striking, though, is how raw they still sound for a band this deep into arena territory. Even without digging deep into the earliest material, there’s a sense that they’ve never quite polished the edges off. That rawness is still there, still central to what they do.
“Biblical” is the moment where everything locks into place: 16,000 people moving as one, the arena washed in white light. Later, “A Hunger in Your Haunt” coils and hangs heavy in the air, before “Black Chandelier” becomes a communal singalong.
They pause briefly, strip things back acoustically for “Machines”, then barely pretend they’re leaving before returning for “The Captain”. Neil asks if there’s time for a few more songs. Of course there is.
Birmingham certainly isn’t complaining when “Living Is a Problem Because Everything Dies” lands, followed by “Bubbles”, before the confetti finally falls for “Many of Horror” – the big ballad, the release, the shared exhale.
And through it all, there’s this strange sense of understatement. Yes, Biffy Clyro are a megaband. Of course they are. But they’ve always done it on their own terms. Even now, years into this career, there’s still that lingering feeling of how did they get here?
“This is the sound that we make. Can you hear it?” they sing.
Let’s be fair.
You aren’t missing it.
Yet Biffy Clyro remain something of a unique outlier – rock’s hardest-working overnight arena band, the 25 year sensation– and nights like this show exactly why.
