Gig review: OneRepublic at Co-op Live, Manchester
With a career-spanning grab-bag of platinum smashes, the Colorado Springs outfit deliver glossy hooks by the payload on a midweek Manchester night.
“We’ve been coming here since 2008,” OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder notes to a lively house at Manchester’s Co-op Live. “The first 12 years we came, it rained, but now? It doesn’t seem to any more.”
The Colorado Springs-formed six-piece occupy a strange position in the cultural landscape. On the one hand, several of their hits are entrenched into the post-millenium radio canon, with more than half-a-dozen platinum smashes on these shores alone and plenty more back home.
On the other, they find themselves sometimes caught in the shadow of their frontman and his penchant for delivering copper-bottomed anthems to other acts; inescapable pop juggernauts penned for Adele, Ed Sheeran, the Jonas Brothers and Taylor Swift, to name just a few of his clients.
Even opener Ella Henderson is not immune, with her signature single Ghost owes a debt to Tedder.
Here, just off the Ashton Canal for a midweek arena engagement, the singer is determined that his band reclaim their position in the chart-friendly pecking order. Save for a few indulgences as he unfurls piano-led renditions of torch anthems Halo and Bleeding Love – songs that he penned for Beyonce and Leona Lewis, respectively – the focus is squarely drawn to his own work under the OneRepublic umbrella.
The result is a career-spanning grab-bag through a back catalogue less defined by chart placements and more so by an under-the-radar earworm payload ratio.
The results vary – even with his Midas touch, Tedder cannot knock it out of the park every time – but across the better part of two hours, there’s enough win-’em over than bin-’em over material at regular intervals to ensure attention seldom wavers.
Good Life, replete with a whistle-friendly refrain, captures the first big singalong of the night; Rescue Me, Run and the stadium-rock beef of Stop and Stare duly follow, each more cacophonously massive than the last, precision-tooled to take the roof off venues like this.
A brief sojourn to a B-stage offers some campfire-esque intimacy to proceedings, but it is upon the band’s return that they hit top gear with a practical cavalcade of glossily buffed bangers that put the crowd into the stratosphere: the power-balladry thrills of Apologize, the sun-kissed swing behind I Ain’t Worried, the ubiquitous polish of Counting Stars.
By the time OneRepublic power through a climactic medley that crescendoes off the back of the club-friendly If I Lose Myself, it feels like mission accomplished.