The 1975 at The SSE Hydro was definitely their biggest show in Scotland to date.
Having played the Summer Sessions at Bellahouston Park last September, their Hydro set remained largely the same with only the addition of new songs released in the months since changing it up.
Playing new music on a stadium tour is always risky business, and even with the addition of lyric videos and visuals to accompany the new tunes, the audience seemed slightly disengaged during these moments (not for lack of trying to remain entirely on Matty Healy’s wavelength).
The 1975 are best suited to festival line-ups; sweaty, energetic basements or airy, experiential venues like old churches and reclaimed spaces.
Playing in a stadium-sized arena such as the SSE Hydro doesn’t seem to fit.
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Yes, it’s one of the spaces in the city that will fit the burgeoning fan base of the band, but something of the magic is lost. The sheer size of the venue stops Healy’s quirks hitting the mark, and when he tells the audience to ‘be quiet’ to listen to Greta Thunberg’s message (which he played, unchanged, to the Glasgow crowd only months before) seems quite hollow.
When he follows this up by telling the crowd, ‘don’t shout your political opinions at me, because I don’t care’, it comes off as rude. Maybe the reason that ‘modernity has failed us’, as Healy himself sings, is because we no longer engage in discussions with people whose political opinions differ from our own and instead choose to preach, literally, to audiences of thousands. Deliver a message, but don’t make the most memorable part your own attitude when executing that delivery.
Despite these small moments, The 1975 do put on a good show. Each album has its own light theme, and the stagecraft is exciting and refreshing.
Their older tunes are their strongest, the ones that no matter what age the crowd are, they react to well – ‘Sex’, ‘Chocolate’, ‘Love It if We Made It’ and ‘TWOTIMETWOTIME’ draw the most screams. The 1975 are at their best when they sing the songs that made us first fall in love with them.
It’s just that the intimacy and energy those songs induce in their fans are harder to reach when they’re reaching for thousands at a time.
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