Editors Live at the Brixton Academy 2006

In the dark, reclining obscurity of London’s Brixton Academy James Berry hunches over a shiny platter of beer and gazes into the bright, portentous fortunes of uber cool cyber-brummies, the Editors. ‘Baby, pleeease, stop scryin’.

Crud can be really quite bad at making predictions. We thought Coldplay had probably peaked when they sold out Brixton Academy at the tail end of their first album and would just fade into indistinguishable mulch at the bottom of indie history’s bin. We honestly didn’t think the public would be stoopid enough to indulge The Darkness’ charade further than 1st place in the ‘Guffaw Guffaw Yeah Whatever’ category in end of year polls (glad to see you’ve been belatedly introduced to common sense though). And we really thought the Beta Band might be the new Rolling Stones and would play the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics inside a giant washing machine at the personal behest of King Charles. It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re wrong, in principle, just that we’re not always right.

And we didn’t think Editors had it in ’em, not for T4-munching mainstream success. Nah. Which is no slight on their taut capabilities, nor their hat-trick of killer singles through 2005, nor the wrestling of Interpol’s dour-bass-pop rusty-nail crown back to UK shores. They just seemed too serious, too pale, too monochrome, perhaps just too uncontroversial to capture imaginations on any scale. Live, there was no denying they could jab, possibly even above their weight, but just not heavily enough. Like we said though, regrettably, like Michael Fish in ’87, our forecasts aren’t always exact.

The mass, throaty stadia sing-alongs to the zestful-punk minimalism of ‘Munich’ and the strung-up pounding of ‘Fingers In The Factories’, the best part of 5,000 voices nudging ‘anthemic’ onto a list of approved adjectives more usually tipped towards ‘moody’, ‘introverted’ and ‘morose’, see that we’re proved wrong. It’s like the Ark in Brixton Academy tonight – most strains of music fan, from wide-eyed 16 year olds, to Goths, to indie-fringed students, to the more elderly listener, accessorised girlies and beefy beered-up lads hollering along like Ricky Kaiser Chief mauling Oasis and jumping wildly out of style and time, lope in 2 by 2, 4 by 4 – there can be no denying they’ve crossed over, even if you’d never have predicted it.

They were always confident, or at least they were never that meek, but Tom launches wide-eyed onto stage with the look of a man carrying a naked flame, knowing not exactly what he’s capable of, just that it’s probably going to end with him having to explain himself in a small dark cell amid the lingering smell of paraffin. Chris climbs the speaker stack gripping his guitar with unflinching visceral intent. Red lights = danger. They only let this wired retro-revolutionary momentum dip by opening with ‘Someone Says’, not their strongest ace and a little early U2-lite, but they correct this quickly with the dark mid-paced factory regimentation of ‘All Sparks’ and the increased hyperdrive of ‘Blood’.

Tom is an object of fascination throughout, not so much juddering around the stage to the music in a wiry tangle of limbs and guitar, but rather bounding in uncharted patterns of motion waiting fro the music to catch him up, starting as he does sometimes before the first beat has thumped out of the PA. He seems, when he talks as much as when he moves (passionately in both instances), a busy collision of nervous energy, and his rather unconventional dancing style appears to be a direct result of the passage between that, the desire to give his songs a 3D presence and in order to extend a hand of connection towards his audience. He may cut a much more ordinary figure than many pop stars we become obsessed with, but his presence onstage is genuine, intuitive and exaggerated without becoming needlessly eccentric (unlike Alan Rakes, for instance). Which, coupled with the industrious strength of the songs, goes someway to explain the fervour.

Set-list