Biffy Clyro
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★☆
Biffy Clyro have been one of the best live bands going for a long time, so fans arrive at 3Arena on Saturday with high expectations. Few leave disappointed.
The crowd are well primed by punk support from the American hard-core group The Armed and the English duo Soft Play, the latter of whom bring in plenty fans of their own. Soft Play’s drummer, Isaac Holman, pre-empts any questions about his own kit by leading the crowd from the middle of the pit in a chant of “f**k the hi hat”.
The pair changed their name from Slaves in 2022, as it “doesn’t represent what our music stands for”. The visceral Punk’s Dead skewers critics of the change. They finish their set with “a 15-second song called Girl Fight, about girls having a fight”, and an all-girl mosh pit. They also issue a warning not to “step on the white kabuki or Simon will have your guts for garters”.
Thankfully the curtain survives and Simon Neil, the Biffy Clyro frontman, opens the band’s set from behind ghostly white sheets the like of which have produced many a horror. He reassures us, however, that “with a little love we can defeat them all”.
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The curtain rises to reveal the rest of the band on a three-tier stage as they launch into the bristling Hunting Season, also off the Kilmarnock trio’s new album, Futique.
Over their three decades together, the trio of Neil and twins Ben and James Johnston have progressed from small gigs in Scotland to playing Glastonbury and Wembley Stadium and picked up some touring musicians along the way. This show, at a less than sold-out 3Arena, still feels intimate, however.
The Scottish rockers began this tour in Belfast on Friday night without James, their bassist. In December he said he wouldn’t join the band this time because of mental-health and addiction issues. He said he had recently started to receive professional help and assured fans “there is light at the end of the tunnel”.
Naomi MacLeod, formerly of the Dublin band Bitch Falcon, doesn’t miss a beat after stepping in at short notice, but the band’s dynamic feels a little different, with the focus on Neil even more than usual. The band dedicate Friendshipping, from the new album, to Johnston midway through the gig.
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Futique features heavily in the set list, so it’s just as well the long-term Biffy loyalists know the September release well. It’s the anthems from deeper in the catalogue that bring the place alive, however: That Golden Rule and Who’s Got a Match? light the touchpaper.
After the uplifting Biblical, Neil says it’s good to be back in Dublin: “We’ve missed you guys so f***ing much.” A few years ago it didn’t seem certain they’d be back. Neil told the Independent recently that they considered breaking up in the wake of the pandemic and the “f***ing nightmare” that was the “Myth of the Happily Ever After” tour in the midst of that. Instead they took a two-year hiatus. Perhaps it’s telling that only one song for that album features on Saturday night.
There’s the staccato power of Living Is a Problem, classic crowd-pleasing singalongs to Black Chandelier, Mountains and the acoustic emotional favourite Machines, but much of the crowd are waiting to hear just one word: Bubbles. It arrives in the encore and brings even the old guard in the seated section to their feet.
There’ll always be a space in Dublin’s heart for Biffy.
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