According to band leader Gary Lightbody, it took the hugest show of their careers for Snow Patrol to stop worrying and learn to love big stages. “We had to look like a bunch of students who’d stopped by on their way back from a pub crawl in front of a billion people before we realised that presentation does matter,” he has said of their Live 8 slot in ‘05. “Before, we thought, ‘It’s just about the music,’ and it backfired on us. Our show became a ‘show’ soon after that…”
It’s an admission that runs around my mind throughout tonight’s O2 performance. Here we are, nearly seven later, on the opening night on a mammoth 69-date world tour that will see the Bangor boys attempt to solidify their position alongside the U2s and Coldplays of this world. And everything a stadium act should be doing seems to be in place. There’s the set stuffed with radio anthems. There’s the genial enthusing about how brilliant Dublin is. There’s bright light upon bright light shining down on the big stage. And yet there’s something missing that’s hard to pinpoint. It’s not a comment you’d often make about this fine venue but I have a feeling that the setting is doing the act no favours tonight.
The sound is oddly muted, the audience frozen in their seats until the end. For his part, Gary Lightbody now looks the part, leather-clad and loving it, but there are times when too much banter is a bad thing: the songs dedicated to family members can make the ordinary member of the audience feel excluded.
The opening brace of ‘’I’ll Never Let Go’ and ‘Take Back The City’ is a promising, enthused start and the deployment of the superlative ‘Run’ before the halfway point is brave and a real highlight. The rest of the set is less compulsive. The 20 minutes primarily peppered with Fallen Empires material towards the home stretch is most welcome – ‘Called Out In The Dark’ is particularly refreshing – but the edges of the playing seem to have been smoothed out live and, to my ears, the techno quirks and adventure of the new stuff are downplayed.
You can't argue with the strength of the singalongs, and it's never less than competent, but maybe that's the problem. The furrow they're now ploughing seems to be making its way through each of the world's enormodomes. It's just... maybe they were more interesting on the pub crawls.