Tuesday 30th August 2022
Everyone has a live music bucket list. That one artist you have never got round to seeing live. Maybe you had the opportunity and missed it. Maybe they have simply stopped touring (shout out to Tom Waits). But everyone has their white whale. I missed Connor Oberst back when he played Leeds Festival 2008, but Bright Eyes as a full band haven’t played in the UK since playing Latitude Festival way back in 2011. I was excited when the band announced they were getting back together, thrilled when they released new music and positively ecstatic when tour dates were announced… and then a global pandemic happened. Due to Oberst’s reputation for being troubled (he has struggled to complete every date on this very tour), I wasn’t totally convinced that this was finally going to be my Bright Eyes moment until he walked onstage with Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott, plus a rotating backing band on strings, horns, extra percussion and anything else they can lay their hands on. The time is now…
‘Dance and Sing’ is a low key start, but by playing ‘Lover I Don’t Have to Love’ – one of his many master works – so early into the set, Oberst and his band already have the adoring audience on side. And boy, does that song sound great performed live with a full string section. Hopefully, Oberst is in a better place now than when he wrote that song because it is jet black. This is exemplified by his declaration later in the set that all his love songs ‘end in tragedy’. This is what we came for. All the miserable girls and the sad young men in the audience want to suffer right along with the band.
While that track is tragically the sole representative from Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground – probably the band’s finest album – we are treated to plenty of older material to keep long time fans happy. ‘An Attempt to Tip the Scales’ sounds as beautiful and fragile as ever, before the insistent, discordant riff of ‘Jejune Stars’ brings the house down. In between songs, samples from old movies are played ‘so I don’t have to talk’ as Oberst explains later. This only adds to the sense that we are witnessing the soundtrack to the apocalypse.
A brief introduction that sees our troubled troubadour thanking the support band and giving an outline of the circumstances that led to comeback album Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was precedes ‘Mariana Trench’ and a wonderful rendition of ‘One and Done’ before a distorted and emotional run through of ‘Neely O’Hara’ sees a number of people in the audience openly weeping (including my wife who is in bits by this point).
‘Persona Non Grata’, ‘Shell Games’ and ‘Poison Oak’ are albums apart and separated by decades, seeing all three of them played together is a striking demonstration of how much incredible music Oberst and his band have produced. You could throw this set out and play 20 totally different songs and still have a set to rival any other artist out there. There can be no higher praise. ‘The Calendar Hung Itself’ just about holds up without falling apart completely – surely the only way to do such an alarming song justice, before the first part of the set is closed out by ‘Comet Song’.
There is some genuine jeopardy when the band leave the stage as they are gone for what feels like an age, but following screams and whistles from the rabid crowd, the band re-emerge for a truly magnificent version of ‘First Day of My Life’ – a song that Oberst has had a difficult relationship with in the past. He now seems at peace with it, and it is the London audience that feels the benefit. An incredible moment. After that, ‘I Believe in Symmetry’ and particularly closing track ‘One For Me, One For You’ feel a little anti-climatic, but for an artist that has touched so many lives over three decades in the music industry, Bright Eyes have earned the right to play whatever the hell they want. I can guarantee that everyone in that audience left the iconic Hammersmith Apollo in raptures. And me? Well, I’m just delighted to have finally seen one of my heroes. A night to treasure.