Music

Royal Blood, SSE Hydro, Glasgow

Jonathan Geddes

Three stars

As Royal Blood vocalist Mike Kerr noted during their set, it has been three years since the Brighton twosome last graced the SSE Hydro, for the MTV Europe Music Awards. Decent odds would have been available that they would return as headliners in their own right, yet here they were, now firmly at the top table of modern British rock.

This has presented Kerr and hat wearing drummer Ben Thatcher (who now has a gong to bash) with the tricky challenge of taking a musical style that thrives best in sweaty, down’ n dirty clubs, and transplanting it into arenas. Despite a larger stage, complete with walkway into the crowd and big screens, this was still a sparse show, focused firmly around Kerr and Thatcher making a tremendous racket. At their best, there is a primal roar to their music, with the relentless Where Are You Now? and the surprising pop skip underneath You Can Be So Cruel flourishing.

Not everything worked as well. Two backing vocalists, cutting shapes on a platform, struggled to be heard above the din, and Kerr’s voice wasn’t always powerful enough to register either. Neither man is a particularly vibrant showman, which affects large gigs more than anywhere else and meant the more formulaic likes of Look Like You Know or Blood Hands, all power but no thrust, had little to lift them, and even the moshing near the front slowed considerably there.

That was not a fate that befell their biggest hits, with Little Monster featuring a pummelling drum solo and Figure It Out sounding enormous, before Kerr indulged in pantomime style antics at the encore’s Out of the Black, dividing the crowd and leading both cheers and boos. At those points they’d cracked making an arena show feel lively at last.