If the ever-expanding number of NME tours tells us one thing, it’s that the demand for seeing bands work their magic in the live arena has never been greater. We’re constantly told that it’s touring, not record sales, that is keeping all but the very highest echelons of the music industry afloat. And who better to cash in than the NME? Their flagship NME Awards tour has long been a bastion of saleable yet credible guitar music and even better value, whilst the NME Radar tour has, since its 2005 inception, proved a perfectly-pitched arbiter of ‘who’s next’ for the indie masses. One need only look at the previous headliners such as La Roux (2009), Crystal Castles (2008) and Maximo Park (2005) to know that get it right more often than not. Now even the Radar tour has a sister-site to boost even lesser known acts, the so-called ‘Autumn Radar Tour’.
However, despite the tour’s track record, there’s a murmur of suspicion amongst tonight’s assembled throng that this year it might not come off for headliners The Joy Formidable. Anyone who has seen the band in pokier surroundings – such as an incendiary show at the Camden Barfly last December – will know that despite their simple guitar-bass-drums ensemble, the trio have always been able to hold their own (and then some) in the noise stakes. But that was in 300 person venues. The cauldron-like Koko, with its rising stories and deep, dingy pit of a central dancefloor could be a much more taxing engagement.
The doubters needn’t have worried, as the Welsh pop-gazers fill every inch of Koko’s cavernous expanse of stairwells and stalls with crescendo after crescendo of beautiful noise. Launching straight into two new songs might seem brave to the point of folly, but with such confident, effusive delivery the audience are instantly charmed – the sheer saturation of sound allowing no time to act upon any misgivings. It’s a third of the way through the set before the band play anything from their 2009 debut, A Balloon Called Moaning. When they do, the one-two punch of ‘The Greatest Light Is The Greatest Shade’ and ‘Austere’ stir what started as a rebellious gaggle of moshers into a sea of pogoing patrons stretching rows and rows back.
Whilst the band’s main strength surely lies in livewire frontwoman Ritzy – a bundle of wide-eyed energy and sweetly melancholic vocal delivery – her co-conspirators revel in their equal billing, with drummer Matt unconventionally positioned to the right-front of stage. They’re an act who are almost impossible to dislike; wholly lacking in pretension and with a raw passion for their craft too often forgotten by today’s bright young things.
And the songs. Even the superb ‘The Last Drop’ is eclipsed tonight by a swirling, visceral ‘Whirring’, expanded in length and breadth to peak with a thrilling climax of distorted noise after singer Ritzy bustles into the crowd with guitar in hand. It seems like a seminal moment in 2010. If this is the sound of tomorrow, then the future is in safe hands.
Thanks to Roz @ Atlantic
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