Gig review: Biffy Clyro at Co-op Live, Manchester
One man down but still arrestingly loud, the East Ayrshire arena favourites distil this muscular display of songcraft into a terrific arms-aloft paean for absent friends.
“Manchester, I see you,” Biffy Clyro frontman Simon Neil cackles, Stratocaster slung in the air with the triumphant spectacle of a comic-book hero. Characteristically bare-chested and stripped to the waist, the singer grins with wild-eyed delight at the city’s Co-op Live, for what is the largest date of this tour thus far. “Thanks for coming out to the rock show. We’ve missed you so much.”
The East Ayrshire arena favourites arrive this winter on the back of a turbulent few months, one man down but still arrestingly loud. Last year’s tenth studio album Futique earned them their first chart-topper record in half a decade, but this return to the nation’s enormo-domes comes minus a third of their tight-knit group after bassist James Johnston quit the road in order to treat mental health and addiction issues.
It is a testament to their familial bond – the trio have been together since their high-school days – that Neil and Johnston’s twin brother Ben are full-blooded in their determination to honour their bandmate.
Across a near-two-hour set, deputised by touring super-sub Naomi McLeod and with lashings of baroque strings behind their pop-metal anthems, they distil this muscular display of songcraft into a terrific arms-aloft paean for absent friends, felt with quivering emotion.
Material from their latest effort is mostly received with open arms; A Little Love, unfurled with the band draped under gauzy art-rock curtains, hews near to the terrace-bellow template that has buttered their bread for almost two decades now, while the stately A Thousand and One proves to be another softly potent addition to what is a stacked bench of heart-on-sleeve torch ballads. Friendshipping meanwhile makes for a fitting tribute to their missing member, all scrambled fills and tangle-truss rhythms that echo off the walls with buzzy aplomb.
Still, it is the reliable depth of a festival-favourite catalogue that conjures the biggest cheers time and again, from the anime-sugar acceleration that powers Tiny Indoor Fireworks forward, to the wiry propulsion beneath A Hunger in Your Haunt and its kinetic bellow.
Even then, Biffy do save their best for last, with a closing trifecta that jointly bludgeons the prog-math peaks of Living is a Problem Because Everything Dies and Bubbles into a fiery hyper-kinetic assault before Many of Horror bows out with full waterworks.
“Manchester, you’ve been magnificent,” Neil intones amid the climactic cacophony. So too have they; wonderfully resolute and defiantly unbowed.