Kasabian & The Maccabees @ Brixton Academy 04/12/2014
Without doubt 2014 belonged to Kasabian. They owned the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury on Sunday night with one of the most brilliant headline sets in recent memory. The week before they had played a historic hometown show in front of 50,000 people at Victoria Park in Leicester. Kasabian really are in the form of their lives both on stage and on record. The acclaimed new album ‘48:13’ received fantastic reviews across the board and in the live arena they have given some of the best performances of their career so far. These final gigs of the year - a short tour up and down the country culminating in a five-night residency at London's Brixton Academy - were essentially a glorified victory lap crossed with a good excuse for a piss-up. All five nights were sold out.
The Maccabees opened up the night as solid support with four guitars on stage (yes four!). The Maccabees have spent the year holed up in their Elephant and Castle studio, slowly working on an album that they'd hoped would have been released a year before. By all accounts, it has been a long and painful process for the band but they start to reveal the fruits of their arduous labour, debuting their new material in a support slot to test the water. It's been a long time since The Maccabees played second billing to anyone but tonight, there's magic in the air.. The four new songs they play are unequivocally some of their best material yet. Darker, more forceful but with a heartfelt touch, they hit hard. 'Kamakura' sledgehammers in on the chorus, singer Orlando Weeks joined in a three-part wall of vocals by White brothers Felix and Hugo; 'WWI Portraits', meanwhile, is a broodier proposition than anything they have previously penned. Best, however, are the latter two offerings: 'Spit It Out' starts off in a delicate patchwork of spindly, delicate Radiohead-isms before morphing into a howling, crashing anthem, while 'Marks to Prove It' (the most obvious 'hit' of the new tracks) has people moshing on first listen.
THE MACCABEES = PELICAN
The Maccabees go off, and then the agonising half hour countdown begins before the mighty Kasabian come on stage. You know the drill with Kasabian gigs by now: the clock timer ticks down ominously until it reaches zero and then the stage lights dim and the s**t hits the fan. There I was, a 49 year old grandmother, right in the fromt row of the mosh pit with my 20-something daughter who had got the tickets as my early Christmas present. I may have got shoved, bruised, and been squashed until I was breathless by madly moshing, reckless young kids drunk on beer and the heady excitement of seeing their heroes - but I loved every minute of the madness! Bumblebee kicked it all off
KASABIAN - BUMBLEBEE - BRIXTON ACADEMY 04-12-2014
I’d been desperate to see Kasabian since watching them headline Glastonbury on TV, . The boys have amassed such a back catalogue of epic tunes over the years that there was no let up in the standard during the two hours of earsplitting sound they delivered. They are fantastic live, and Serge Pizzorno is absolutley brilliant at writing classic anthemic rock songs like ‘Eez-eh’ and ‘Bumblebee’ which were just meant to be performed in the live arena. Tonight is about congregating the vast empire they've amassed in their own hedonistic church and watching the madness unfurl.
Tonight the band are on joyous, celebratory form. Guitarist Serge, always partial to the ridiculous, has adorned his usual stage uniform of slogan T-shirt and skeleton trousers with a large bushy fox tail. They bound around, get the lasers out, kiss each other on the head, and throw in all manner of snippet covers from Cameo's 'Word Up' to Fatboy Slim's 'Praise You'. In between, they bring out an almost unrivalled catalogue of bangers that refuse to let the pace slip even for a minute. Say what you want about Kasabian, but they know how to work a crowd. . 'Shoot the Runner' is huge. 'Switchblade Smiles' is epic. ' 'LSF (Lost Souls Forever)' threatens to explode the walls. I love a good boogie to Treat but The highlight for me was hearing Empire and Fire – the place was absolutely rocking by that time.
"You're very good tonight," winks singer Tom Meighan . "Same time tomorrow, yeah?". They also had a superb lights show of eye hurting brilliance. There was plenty of Meighan swagger on view, looking like he wouldn’t be happy until he’d incited a riot, and although he isn't a particularly outstanding vocalist, he impressed with his work this night. Serge jumps into the press pit during Treat and like a teenage groupie, I lean over the barrier and manage to touch his white t-shirt for a brief second as he rythmically bound on past other desperate outreached hands. He's high on adulation and full of explosive energy . I am very happy despite feeling totally battered when we finally leave, and my ears are ringing. a friend of mine warned this would be a boisterous crowd!
KASABIAN - TREAT 04/12/2014
With tour tickets for big names being so hard to come by these days and so expensive, you really can’t grumble at being lucky enough to be part of an “event” rather than your average gig. I was so pleased I got to experience the band, from the front row, in a smaller venue because from now on it looks like they are fast becoming the sort of band who are just as well suited to playing to large stadiums and mass audiences.
