Best of 2022 – Top 10 live bands
The bands that ruled the gig circuit in 2022
The stars certainly aligned for Black Midi this year. If any proof were needed that they were plugged direct into some kind of cosmic zeitgeist, then surely it was the fact that their Hellfire album dropped the week that Britain suffered its terrifyingly 40 degree heatwave, prompting one tabloid to repeat the title as its standalone front page headline. The South Londoners responded by driving around the capital handing out ice creams. The glace cherry on top of all this was their London album launch show, outside on a barmy evening at Somerset House, where their avant garde complexities were greeted by a very visceral, sweating moshpit of fans who seemed to know every unexpected twist and turn already. The moment they burst into their cover of Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ before launching into an elongated medley of their favourite songs, from Frank Ocean to AC/DC, was peak 2022, simple as. But they also played what felt like hundreds of shows, all across the States as well as the UK, and topped that off by announcing separate gigs at the relatively intimate Village Underground devoted to their three different LPs for March 2023. BM, we salute you!!
2. The Orb
Having done the official anniversary thing for their debut LP Ultraworld… at the impressively respectable Festival Hall, Alex Paterson and Michael Rendell celebrated – and performed – its successor UFOrb‘s 30th birthday by playing at what is effectively their local, the Fox & Firkin in distant South London suburb Lewisham. But, like Black Midi, their exalted position in this list is as much down to turning in a stupendous amount of shows and many of them in places their contemporaries wouldn’t even be able to find on a map. Not just that, but they continue to press on with new material – the fan groups have been frothing at a new track with a reggae vocal that they’ve been ending on. God bless them and all who sail in their crazy ambient dub techno spaceship.
3. Turnstile
With the eerily familiar mass cancellation of shows preceding them, many were unsure if Baltimore’s genre-fluid hardcore heroes in the making would even attempt to make their way across the water back in February. Keep in mind that the last show Turnstile played back in 2020 before the pandemic hit, was in London’s ULU. They subsequently cancelled all remaining dates, travelled home and caught Covid. Two years, a few worldwide lockdowns and a career defining album later, they’ve humbly returned to our shores for a brief run of the UK, albeit in much larger venues than those of their previous visit.
It nearly goes without saying that Turnstile delivered with every performance, as the lyrics in ‘No Surprise’ so aptly put it – “You really gotta see it live to get it”. What’s changed since their last UK visit is the unprecedented surge in popularity that their seminal third record (Glow On) has garnered them, while anyone paying close attention could see this groundswell slowly brewing since 2018. There’s admittedly something odd about witnessing older cuts from the ‘Step 2 Rhythm’ EP such as ‘Canned Heat’ or ‘7/Keep It Moving’, played at a show where fans aren’t stagediving or being handed the mic to sing every second line. Alas, these are the minute struggles of a successful hardcore band; trading in the small, intense and dingy bars for vast rooms and halls, that are only going to expand in capacity as time marches on.
4. Kraftwerk
We’ve all got used to the idea of the dance music’s Beatles doing the rounds, but they proved they’re more than capable of continuing to be spectacular in so many ways with their appearance at Field Day in August. How? The short answer is by slipping the rarely played but universally loved The Model into their set and employing Carl Craig and Moodymann playing back to back as their tour support. The truth is a bit more nuanced, something to do with laying down the templates for electro, hip-hop and synthpop and paving the way for house, techno and everything that came in its way. In the year that Russia invaded Ukraine, we need their message of post-war European co-operation and integration more than ever.
5. ABBA
Not technically a live act, although this is close as it gets – Abba’s avatars grabbed the headlines this year, reducing Jarvis Cocker to tears and pointing a new way forward for the gigs of the future. Which, of course, wouldn’t mean a thing if they didn’t have a truckload of great songs to chuck at proceedings, which of course they do have – and some to spare. The show heads out on a world tour in 2023, but there’s still a chance to catch it this Spring at the Olympic Stadium.
Reunited ’emo by way of theatrical alternative rock’ icons My Chemical Romance reformed at the end of 2019 for a single December show in Los Angeles before quickly confirming they were truly back with expansive world tour arrangements, set to commence right here in the UK. With the pandemic turning 2020/2021 into the subsequent write offs they were, it’s taken two and a half years for the band to finally have the opportunity to make good on their promise of triumphant, exuberant, cathartic return. But in Milton Keynes, they delivered tenfold.
Playing for close to two solid hours, the final moments of the night are paid to what is now not only considered the group’s opus but a modern emo and alt rock staple, ‘The Black Parade’. The theatricality factor is on overdrive as the Vaudeville on methamphetamine jolt of ‘Mama’ has thousands joining in animated abandon, while emo’s own ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.
7. Pink Eye Club
One to watch for 2023, especially as he’s just announced he’ll be working with esteemed outsider art supporters The Blang label, Pink Eye Club is a man, a microphone and some banging house music, and song titles like ‘Suicidal In A Rural Town’ and ‘You Seemed Like A Nice Guy (But You Turned Out To Be a Nazi)’ that mark this Sussex resident to be one of the most unpretentious and open, articulate voices emerging right now.
8. Decius
Another name to watch next year, but the decadent triumph that was their debut show at the rough and ready but effortlessly cool MOT Unit 18 venue in the shadow of Millwall’s stadium in South East London deserves to be marked as one of the events of the year. We’d be lying if we said it was as sculpted and precise as their just-released first album Vol1 – that will surely come in time – but the glorious mess of unadulterated acid house machine funk and Fat White Family man Lias Saoudi’s vocals still proved magnificently debauched and suitably otherworldly.
9. Tool
While there has been the odd festival appearance once every few years, it’s been well over a solid decade since the veteran four-piece have toured extensively, with these two London dates in May marking their true return to the city. Spellbinding lights, interlocked grooves and mathematical chugs, all tempered by monumentally powerful and earnest vocals… an expertly crafted, perfected, profoundly uplifting and unifying musical experience.
10 Blancmange
Blancmange have always been a central part of the 80s synthpop revolution, integrally weaved into its tapestry even if others are more obviously prominent. You only need to hear genuine pop monsters like ‘Living On The Ceiling’ and their closing tune ‘Blind Vision’ lurking among their seven song set and you’ll be left wondering why they aren’t more appreciated. They have the dancefloor credentials and art school visual cool of New Order, the gently self-mocking sideways wink of the Pet Shop Boys and the raw slabs of sticky melody and modernist throbbing of Depeche Mode. The only things missing are the stadiums full of sweaty, adoring fans and piles of cash.