“It’s been one of the greatest experiences of our lives,” said Kings of Leon's lead singer Caleb Followill towards the end of this big outdoor gig on a warm summer’s night in London. “Thank you very much.” I’m glad he had a good time, and his diffident Southern charm was appreciated by the vast crowd, but I wish I could say the same; for me, this was certainly an experience, but not a great one. Here’s why.
First, there’s the mysterious process by which Kings of Leon have become a globe-conquering, arena-packing, Hyde Park-filling band, which they seem to have achieved by becoming duller, slower and sludgier. Once they were young and hungry and lean and downright weird – three brothers and a cousin from Nashville, Tennessee who played fast, sharp, gutsy guitar rock. They had their own sound - tough, yelpy and urgent. Then they went on tour with U2 and they seemed to decide that big, slow and epic was the way to go; suddenly Kings of Leon were just another band, a group who had seemed to reach premature middle age almost overnight.
And it was this big slow swirling epic material that dominated their two-hour set. Some of it was fine, and all of it was well executed (although I can’t fathom why they feel they need a fifth musician on stage to play guitar, keyboards and percussion; they used to get along fine on their own), but it was hardly enthralling. Also, trying to sound like U2 is all very well (although Kings of Leon are nowhere near as good), but the Irish supergroup’s success as a live band stems in part from their use of the stage, their movement, the confident ease with which they lope and strut and pace. Here, the video screens showed an edgy, fast-cutting black-and-white version of the band’s performance, but this was illusory: the band themselves were largely immobile, rooted to the spot. And unsmiling. Why so serious? Most of their songs seem to be about sex, but to look at Caleb Followill (pictured above) and the rest of the guys you’d think they were singing about the end of the world. Also it wasn’t loud enough.
Then there was the crowd, many of whom spent much of the show treating the band on stage as a backdrop, as the soundtrack to a great big booze-up: they shouted at each other, they shouted into their mobiles, they chatted among themselves, they drank, they staggered off to the loos, they threw not-quite-empty plastic beer bottles around (I was hit by three). I felt like an uninvited guest at someone else’s party, with a band playing somewhere in the distance.
This tedium was enlivened occasionally by more upbeat tunes such as “Molly’s Chambers” and “Notion”, only for the momentum to be lost as the band slipped back into another mid-tempo chug-rocker. Only towards the end, as darkness fell and the stage took on a radiant glow, did the night finally come alive: “Sex on Fire” (the globe-conquering hit from their multi-platinum 2008 album Only by the Night) had the crowd punching the air, roaring the lyrics, and throwing yet more beer bottles, “Use Somebody” prompted a mass singalong, and “Knocked up” was sinuous fun.
This sudden final flurry of excitement seemed sufficient to send the crowd off into the night happy and buzzing, but I arrived home dusty, tired, stinking of beer, and singularly unimpressed by the Followill brothers and their cousin (and their mysterious fifth member). Call me a grumpy old git if you like, but I expected more from a band of their stature and status.
- Find Kings of Leon on Amazon
- Kings of Leon play the V Festival in Chelmsford, Essex and Hylands Park, Staffs on 21-22 August
Watch Kings of Leon performing "Molly's Chambers"
