Bizarre rock pop theatre show to zingy Radio 1 hits - The 1975 excel at the Utilita Arena.
Crowd-roaring, the lights come up on a split-level living room that looks like it is straight out of your parent's house. A car pulls up outside. Seven members of The 1975 touring band lope in, hanging up coats, switching on lamps, pouring themselves glasses of whiskey. In Newcastle's Utilita Arena, it is literally and figuratively a homecoming.
Frontman Matty Healy emerges from a black sofa and shakes himself awake. Lollops to the piano, takes a swig from a bottle of wine and lights a cigarette. There's a 20x5-foot sign to the left of the stage. "NO SMOKING". The role of drunken and disdainful rockstar suits him well.
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An hour later, Matty Healy rips into a raw steak, all teeth, does press-ups to images of Prince Andrew and Liz Truss, and climbs through a TV, leaving the stage in darkness and concluding Act One of The 1975: At Their Very Best.
There's nothing normal about this sold-out arena tour. The band has turned arena music on its head and has somehow made a stadium packed with 11,000 strangers feel intimate, and at times, perverted.
Having been part of the British pop-rock zeitgeist for a decade, the band has earned the right to go a little feral on their arena tour.
Sharply split into very different two acts, the show manages to be everything all at once. The first half feels like an avant-garde, arrogant, art-pop mental breakdown, whereas the second half is more reminiscent of The 1975 we know from 2016 - the northern boys that made it big.
As much as I like a weird show, guest star Lewis Capaldi was a welcome break. Sometimes, Matty Healy veers into the realms of an overenthusiastic English teacher, asking you to pick out contrived metaphors.
In his signature waggish fashion, Capaldi nixed tension. Met by emphatic screams as a bungling technician projects "guest starring... Harry Styles" onto the big screen.
They play the big hits, and the fan favourites, as well as a vast swathe of music from their new album, Being Funny In A Foreign Language, which is set to become a stalwart of my 2023 soundtrack.
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With several members of the band hailing from Newcastle, including the frontman, it is no surprise that Newcastle Brown Ale, NUFC, and Toon icon/father Tim Healy all made appearances. The Northern audience lapped it up.
Matty spoke out in support of the region, saying the North is "underfunded by culturally overexploited".
"All the good art comes from the North," he says. I am inclined to agree.
As we bop to tracks like "Sex" and "Chocolate", you can tell this has been a successful show. You leave the arena with the feeling that you are the only person to ever feel this way about music, whilst knowing that eleven thousand others are thinking the exact same thing.
The 1975 At Their Very Best; an absolute belter.
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