Elbow Take The Point

Elbow, The O2 Arena, Dublin, 31^st of March, 2010

I’ve seen Elbow four times now, and they’ve never failed to surprise.  When they first came to my attention five years ago I was on a hillock somewhere in Laois and a friend of mine told me that they would be bigger and more influential than Radiohead.  I scoffed.  It was the Celtic Tiger, scoffing was what we did back then.  The songs were slow and little needy.  Where was the swagger?  I didn’t get it.  Turns out Elbow were just ahead of the curve.

Six months later I was a rabid fan and caught both the Ambassador show and the “Deck Of The Cutty Sark” show at Oxegen six months after that.  Both were revelatory for entirely different reasons.  In two utterly different venues the band held steady and embraced the audience with a warm devotion that was completely lacking in any other act of their size.   Of course by now The Seldom Seen Kid and One Day Like This were everywhere.  The tea leaves were clear: these guys were going to be major stadium filling rock stars.

Then came Build A Rocket Boys! (complete with exclamation mark).  No doubt a beautiful, elegiac and solid follow up to their biggest album to date.  But anthemic?  Not so much.  My first taste of the album was Lippy Kids, a six minute, percussion free, ode to ASBOs.  Hmph, something wasn’t quite right here.  When I got my hands on the album it became clear that the slower, needier Elbow of Asleep At The Wheel and Cast Of Thousands was back.  Only now, I got it.  It wasn’t slow, it was thoughtful.  And it wasn’t needy, it just required the listeners attention.  It was what it was, take it or leave it, mate.  Ok, great.  But live?  I had my doubts.  Of course Elbow were still ahead of the curve.

From opener The Birds to sing-a-long closer Open Arms the new songs soared in a live setting, while the quieter moments of Lippy Kids and The Night Will Always Win held the audience in a rapt, reverential awe.  Probably the punchiest track on the new album, Neat Little Rows, took on a new life of its own, Mark Potter’s guitar, while restrained and couched on the album, exploded on the stage, threatening to blow the roof of the place right off.  And of the new tracks it was only With Love, that never quite found its feet. 

But it didn’t matter.  Whatever magic that I’d seen at previous Elbow shows just became magnified in the O2 arena.  Somehow the band made the 8,000 capacity auditorium seem like a cramped, sweaty, intimate cellar bar.  Of course much of the credit for this goes, quite deservedly as it happens, to Guy Garvey.  Shambling amiably from the main stage to the smaller, middle of the crowd “B-Stage” like your favourite uncle after a few pints, Garvey invites you in: telling stories, sharing banter, high-fives and hats with the audience, and generally just having the craic.  And in case you were sitting in the Gods and felt a little forgotten about he had a special standing ovation for the row furthest from the stage.  EVERYONE was made to feel included.  Then there are the striking relationships within the band itself.  As Garvey revealed, they’ll have been a band for twenty years in June, and it shows.  No matter what size a venue they perform in the band have taken to performing one or two songs huddled tightly together, sharing the space with each other, bringing them, and more importantly, us, back to the days of “One little room and the biggest of plans”.  It’s always an almost unsettlingly intimate moment and even in the cavernous, new-look Point Depot, it loses none of its potency.  And that is their greatest strength as a live unit.  Their ability to bring you inside that huddle.  When he tells us “Mark Potter on guitar, ladies and gentlemen, he’s my mate”, you just want to be in there gang, and you are, because an Elbow show is an incredibly inclusive experience, as 8,000 people realised last night while singing Open Arms coda “Everyone’s here”.

Despite having more salt than pepper in their hair Elbow are clearly a band looking to the future however.  While much of the main set was made up of the new material, back catalogue standards from Seldom Seen Kid and Leaders Of The Free World did feature.  A no-holds barred rendition of Grounds For Divorce has become an Elbow mainstay while that albums quieter moments Some Riot, Lonliness Of A Tower Crane Driver and Weather To Fly also made the grade.  Previous live favourites Leaders Of The Free World and Forget Myself didn’t however and only Great Expectations, Station Approach and Puncture Repair were there to represent the band prior to their Mercury Prize winning breakthrough.  It’s a sign of the complete confidence the band have in their material and their audience that they can drop two of the foot-slamming, fingers in the air crowd pleasers in favour of a quieter set and still lift the entire room to rapture.  Of course when you can round off the evening with One Day Like This you can be sure that the audience will go home hoarse and happy.  And at least we beat Glasgow in the Sing Off.