“It’s great to be here! It’s great to be anywhere!” is Keith Richards' customary wry introduction to Happy, the single song he gets to front at Rolling Stones gigs. It’s the phrase that entered my mind as soon as we exited the Tube station and saw people thronging to the grand old theatre that I still regard as the Hammersmith Odeon, but now goes by the commercial name Eventim Apollo (and, convolutedly, at various times in its 90-year history, the Gaumont Palace, Labatt’s Apollo, Hammersmith Apollo, Carling Apollo Hammersmith and the HMV Hammersmith Apollo). Because it was great to be out, for one, but also great to be at a gig again, my first since...God knows when. Actually, I can tell you: December 2019. Presumably, then, no one outside Wuhan had heard of “the thing”, as Guy Garvey refers obliquely to it, drawing attention to the fact that, for the vast majority of the three-and-a-half thousand punters assembled for Elbow’s repeatedly-postponed return to the Hammersmith [Insert Name Here], this will be a unique occasion.
“Sorry we’re late,” he quips, once headline proceedings have commenced (as he probably begins every night of a tour already into its final third). He likes to get underway with an audience-softening zinger, and has used this gag before, but tonight there’s an obvious poignancy to it. Like every other UK venue Elbow are appearing at, the audience is tentative, cautiously stepping into the concert experience and its traditions with the added reserve of not fully knowing what the etiquette is - mask on or off?
It is, for many, a first night out in months, with habitual gig-goers having to juggle suddenly clashing shows, with rescheduled dates appearing on calendars like planes in a holding pattern for Heathrow. Before Elbow take to the stage there is polite observance for the support, the Suzanne Vega-ish American, Jessica Hoop, followed by Peter Alexander Jobson of longstanding Elbow mates and fellow Lancastrians, I Am Kloot. Jobson is as jocular as Hoop is winsome, but it serves the correct purpose of a support set in these times to ease the audience into the gig experience once more. Even then, Elbow’s launching into Dexter + Sinister, from 2019’s Giants Of All Sizes, comes as an assault on the eyes as much as the ears, with bright, white staccato strobes pulsing, piercingly, shocking sensorial systems belonging to human pit ponies that have spent the better part of the last 18 months hunched over laptops and smartphones in the permanent half-light of WFH.
It is the start of a two-hour reminder that Elbow are one of the UK’s best live acts, but while they are clearly comfortable in the grand, but modestly-sized interior of the Apollo (a venue they have appeared at on many occasions), you are, very early, reminded of their appeal - the “soaring” anthems that have become associated with the warmth and wide-open communal singing of outdoor summer festivals, rather than a Depression-era cinema next to the M4 flyover in West London.
Garvey is the focal point, but he performs with an avuncularity that is a rarity in rock, not consciously trying to outshine his bandmates, but applying his cuddly bear-like frame and warm humour, to immediately bring the crowd onside. He projects an everyman charm, the loveable mate you’d be just as happy in the company of down the pub as in front of you on stage. It’s an engaging nature that comes across regardless of whether he’s addressing a radio audience, guest starring in Peter Kay’s Car Share, or performing before tens of thousands at Pilton Farm. He is, obviously, Elbow’s vocal representation, but more than just its singer and co-songwriter, he maintains the geniality of a band that produces compelling heartfelt songs without the aggravating pretentiousness of Coldplay, a quartet of similar length of service (“We've been going almost 30 years,” Garvey declares to gasps).
There is, too, a distinctive northerness to Elbow’s music. It’s hard to properly describe, but it’s a north-western ambience accentuated by Garvey’s drawling Bury vowels, unsullied by life outside the region. Theirs is also a music that defies definition, which probably puts them in the “prog” category (Garvey is a noted fan of Peter Gabriel, and Elbow’s first album was cut at Gabriel’s Real World Studios), which is fine by me. You do, though, hear strains of other, equally indefinable influences, like Talk Talk and even the Velvet Underground (especially on Kindling, which appears midway through the set). Because, as these two hours in Hammersmith demonstrate, there’s an intricacy and complexity to Elbow’s music and lyrics, but also a hymn-like quality. Barely a song can’t be described as “anthemic”, a cliché I know, but this is why Elbow are so intrinsically suited to the open space of the festival. Here, you also acknowledge just how good Garvey’s voice is, always at the top of expellation without ever sounding strained. Their songs might bear a lyrical intricacy but the instrumentation of guitarist Mark Potter and his keyboard-playing brother Craig, along with bassist Pete Turner and touring drummer Alex Reeves, plus a couple of strings players (and, I should add, a stageside signer for the hearing impaired, Katie Fenwick - a first for me at a gig - who, to her credit, had learned the lyrics of all three acts) spreads economically across the scope of the band’s often emotionally wrought songs.
Alas, Katie was too far from my Row U eyrie to be of any benefit in articulating Garvey’s wonderfully poetic lyrics, but there was so much more going on in a 17-song set drawn from seven of Elbow’s eight albums released to date, plus the ‘bonus’ of the delightful What I Am Without You, a fairground Wurtlitzer joy of a number, reminiscent in places of Clive Dunn’s Grandad (and from the forthcoming ninth album Flying Dream 1), which was sandwiched by one of their earliest, The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver, and most recent, White Noise White Heat. There were the obligatory singalongs, an inescapable aspect of an Elbow show, starting early with Mirrorball, along with the arm-sailing Magnificent (She Says) and Grounds For Divorce (with Garvey orchestrating a three-part crowd harmony as warm-up to the song's “wooah-woah” chorus), all leading up to the festival behemoth that is One Day Like This. It is, always has, and forever will be a communal pile-in event in its own right, and even if you don’t know all the words, it’s impossible - even for the most ingrained curmudgeon - not to participate. One Day is one of those songs that other acts must be truly envious of, such is its emphatic closing-number nature, but it provides not only the show’s conclusion, but a final paragraph on the nature of the Elbow canon. The strings, too, made me wonder that it must surely only be a matter of time before Garvey & Co get the nod from the Bond producers to produce a theme.
The term ‘emotional’ when applied to pop music can often mean durge or, at risk of enraging those who feel otherwise, Adele’s first couple of albums, at least. Elbow transcend that with intelligence and music that commands the ear, all wrapped in the pleasing personality that is the easy-going frontman, so lacking in commonly-found rock star traits. As a return to gigging goes, we probably couldn't have done any better.
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