Last Friday night, Steph, Tom and I all met in Brixton to relive our youth. Blink 182 were in town for a couple of Reading and Leeds Festival warm up shows and we were off to the second night.
My two-word review of it is – fucking amazing! I love Blink and I’m wondering if people will complain if I demand Blink all night long at my wedding?
We, as usual, started our night off in The Beehive, just up the road from the station and made friends with a few of the regulars. I think we must just have those kind of faces that make people want to chat to us. I think my favourite was the man doing “magic tricks” and getting me to turn my hands over without touching me.
Anyway, we had a few drinks while we let the queue die down and toodled down to the Academy. Sadly, waiting for the queue to subside did mean we missed Neck Deep which I was a bit sad over. I interviewed them at Slam Dunk a few months ago and still haven’t had a chance to see them live.
It still amazes me that Blink 182 have been around for more than 20 years but when they hit the stage last week they still sounded as fresh as ever. Powering through Feeling This, What’s My Age Again? and The Rock Show the crowd went wild, what a way to start a show.
There wasn’t a huge amount of onstage chat but when you have so many massive tunes to fit into an hour and a half or so, I guess there isn’t a lot of room for talking. Pretty much every song you would want to hear was crammed into the set list including songs never before played live on these shores from their Dogs Eating Dogs EP and a cover of Hybrid Moments by The Misfits.
The atmosphere never let up the whole night, everybody in there was excited, loving every minute, singing back every single word and bouncing so high that the structural soundness of the building may have been compromised. This was adulation to the highest degree, 4,000 people eagerly eating out of the palms of their hands.
Their three song encore of Violence, Dammit and Family Reunion was accompanied by a huge, blazing FUCK hanging above them, something that I’d take a guess at being the most Instagrammed gig background ever.
As soon as it was over I wanted to do it all again.
Hopefully, I’ll get to see them again in a couple of weeks when they are headline Leeds Festival and I can dance my little legs off all over again.
Kisses,
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