There are few sights more joyful than Dan Smith attempting to dance.
Arms flailing, knees bending and baseball cap somehow remaining firmly attached to his head, the Bastille frontman moves around a stage like a man who’s just discovered that his limbs are being controlled by somebody in the wings.
It shouldn’t work. It doesn’t really resemble any known form of dancing. And yet, when he does it in front of thousands of people, beneath the illuminated biomes of Cornwall’s Eden Project, it’s strangely magnificent.
Welcome back, Bastille. We’ve missed you.
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It’s been nine years since the London indie-pop heroes last graced the Eden Sessions stage, and quite a bit has happened in that gap.
There have been albums, arena tours, orchestral reinventions, mixtapes, collaborations, a break from performing live and, somewhere along the way, enough enormous pop songs to fill the average band’s greatest hits set several times over.
Things We Lost In The Fire is a suitably dramatic opener, carried by strings and Dan Smith’s unmistakable voice, before Shut Off The Lights and Good Grief send the sun-drenched Cornish crowd into full-blown belt-along mode.
It’s a ludicrously strong opening run. Most acts would save at least one of those songs for the encore; Bastille chuck them out in the first fifteen minutes and carry on as though they’ve got plenty more where that came from.
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Which, of course, they have.
Warmth is as euphoric as ever, Flaws inspires thousands of people to bellow every word back towards the stage, and Oblivion briefly brings the venue to a standstill. It’s a reminder that Bastille’s best moments have always balanced widescreen pop spectacle with something far more vulnerable.
Even at their biggest, they’ve never felt particularly distant.
A lot of that comes down to Smith. He might be standing in front of a sizeable crowd, backed by an expanded live band and a production set-up built for arenas, but he still carries himself like somebody who cannot quite believe that all these people have turned up.
He chats to the audience, reminisces about the band’s previous Eden appearance and bounds around the stage with the same endearingly unpolished enthusiasm he had when Bastille were still playing clubs. Later, during Happier, he disappears into the crowd entirely.
It would be easy for a song streamed billions of times to feel like an obligation at this point. Instead, with Smith surrounded by fans and doing his best to make his way through the audience without causing an insurance incident, it becomes one of the most memorable moments of the night.
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Not that tonight is entirely a nostalgia exercise.
An unreleased song, In The Light Of The Morning, offers a glimpse at what Bastille might have up their sleeves next, while the excellent Save My Soul feels suitably enormous in this setting. The newer material might not yet prompt the same instinctive roar as Laura Palmer or Of The Night, but it suggests that the next chapter of Bastille could be a particularly interesting one.
Still, it’s impossible to compete with Pompeii.
Joined by the omnivocal choir that is tonight’s sold-out Cornish crowd, Bastille close the evening with the song that changed everything for them. Yes, everybody knows it. Yes, we’ve all heard it countless times. No, that doesn’t stop it from sounding absolutely colossal.
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Because that’s the thing about Bastille. It’s easy to take them for granted.
Their songs have been everywhere for more than a decade, and their particular brand of literate, emotionally fraught indie-pop has become such a familiar part of British music that it’s tempting to forget just how unusual their success has been.
But put them on a stage like this, give them two hours and let them work through one of the strongest pop catalogues of their generation, and everything makes sense again.
They’ve got the songs. They’ve got the show. And, in Dan Smith, they’ve got a frontman who can hold thousands of people in the palm of his hand, even if he still can’t quite work out what to do with the rest of his limbs.
And honestly? It’s good to have them back.
