You know the band Bastille, don’t you?
Of course, you do. You might remember them from their smash-hit single, Pompeii – y’know, that cheery little ditty about an ancient volcanic eruption and the instant eradication of a whole town’s population.
Or perhaps you know them from their chart-topping EDM crossover track, Happier. Oh, come on, you know – Happier? The one with the Marshmallow guy, about the guy who’s leaving his girlfriend because he’s utterly convinced that she’ll be better off without him? (Yes, the one with the bass drop.)
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Okay, so you might know Bastille – but do you really know Bastille?
Do you know, for instance, that they’ve spent the last decade chalking up no fewer than four UK top forty albums, but also building a back catalogue that’s as full of gloomy George Orwell references as it is smash-hit pop choruses? Or that they once wrote an entire song about how social media is screwing up an entire generation?
And, crucially – did you know that they also happen to be one of the best live bands in Britain?
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We’re going to come out and say it: at Plymouth’s Pavilions on a cold, damp Easter Sunday, Dan Smith and co. not delivered a stone-cold pop masterclass.
Frankly, dear reader, we’ve never seen anything like it. Over the course of the band’s near-two-hour-long show, the crowd was treated to an array of neo-dystopian visuals, courtesy of the band’s all-new metaversian enterprise (and new album namesake), Future Inc.; an expansive live band, featuring a rhythm section so tight you’d struggle to get it to lend you a fiver; and a selection of some of the finest pop-rock songs that this country has produced over the last ten years.
Call us old-fashioned, but we think that any band that can casually drop a song like Things We Lost In The Fire into the first three songs of their setlist is something pretty flippin’ special. Throw in the likes of Quarter Past Midnight, Good Grief, No Bad Days, and new album highlight Back to the Future, and you’ve got yourselves a setlist that seems more suited to stadiums than semi-shabby ex-leisure-centres in a quiet corner of Devon.
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But, of course, it wasn’t just Bastille’s night.
An honourable mention must also go to hometown heroes The Native, whose upbeat blend of fuzzy indie-pop and knack for crafting a killer chorus will stand them in good stead as they head towards this year’s festival season and beyond. The Devon-born five-piece were given the unenviable task of standing in for the evening’s main support act – prodigious pop star Dylan, if you must know – with a mere few hours’ notice, but to say that they ‘smashed it out of the park’ would be a gross understatement.
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