Music review
Interpol
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
4 stars out of 5
Twenty years is a long time - in life and in music. When Interpol released their 2nd album, Antics, in 2004, the idea of Donald Trump as US president would have been a cause for laughter - not worldwide anxiety. But they were a band, along with their New York contemporaries, such as The National and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, which came of age in a post-September 11 America.
The cult post-punk band chose to mark the 20th anniversary of that album with a tour that swept into Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall last night. The august venue, better known for classical concerts, is a far cry from the sweaty clubs the band came up in but 20 years is a long time and if you are celebrating, why not do it in style?
They began with Next Exit, the church-like keyboards, and slow pace, being the perfect opener, and followed the album track listing, going straight into Evil - probably the song that best sums them up: spiky guitars, driving bass and Paul Banks' insistent, brooding vocals.
They are one of those bands which inspire a devoted following and the sold out crowd responded to the art rockers in typical enthusiastic Glasgow style.
After Antics, the three-piece augmented by a live drummer and keyboardist, took a five-minute break (none of us are as young as we were 20 years ago) before returning to play some of their most-loved songs, such as The Rover and Obstacle 1. The only song that failed to impress was All the Rage Back Home, which got lost amongst the reverb.
The musical highlight of the night was Banks' solo during Pioneer to the Falls, when everyone else dropped out, leaving his plaintive voice to carry the hall. You could have heard a pin drop - until someone shouted out towards the end. The counterpoint to the great Glasgow audience cliche is the inevitable moron quota.
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The emotional heart of the night came from the singer's heartfelt tribute to Scotland which he described as 'special'. He reminded the audience that their first proper release was on a Scottish label, Chemical Underground, and that Scots had always been with them.
They encored with a punch-the-air PDA - sadly, a chunk of the audience had to leave just before that - perhaps due to our poor late-night train service. No matter, this was a fantastic show.
Antics may be 20 years old and belong to a different, pre-2008 crash era - but their urban paranoid blues has never been more relevant in a age of disinformation, a potential second Trump presidency and climate breakdown.
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