Snow Patrol, Birmingham Arena - review
It’s a simple formula; five blokes, four guitars, three modern classics, (almost) two hours on stage and one hell of a night.
Those modern classics?
Oh, come on. If you don’t know Run, Chasing Cars and Just Say Yes then you must have been on a snow patrol to the Arctic Circle for the past 15 years.
But it’s been a while since Gary Lightbody and his loyal crew have been on tour - six years, he tells us.
And now they’re back, pushing seventh studio album Wildness which, while doing OK, has lacked the big belter of previous efforts.
And, boy does this crowd like a big belter.
A little too much at times, oddly.
Look, singalongs are all well and good - and often the sign of a great gig, going well.
But you can get too much of a good thing. So when our Gaz turned over vocals to the assembled masses of Brummie mummies once, it was Ok.
Twice? Gary, we want to hear YOU sing, not Brenda from Bearwood.
And dipping out of the choruses on Chasing Cars? Well, that’s just sacrilege.
Thankfully, there’s more to their repertoire than just the Heart FM playlist and SP racked up some of their other great tunes in between the BIG hits.
Opener Take Back The City, Chocolate and Open Your Eyes showed that you don’t need mega-fancy sets to make a big impact, although the ‘Life on Earth’ visuals later on in the show were absolutely stunning.
It all gave the lovely, likeable Lightbody everything he needed to beam that big Irish smile at the packed arena and end up saying it was the ‘best gig of the tour so far’.
There’s no doubt this was good - very good.
And, while he quipped that ‘we’ll just have to take his word that he doesn’t say that every night’, it sounded pretty genuine to me.
