Over the Christmas holidays, I became familiar with a new band: Bastille. I noticed that they were playing at Leadmill in march and mentioned it to a friend who is a fan of theirs, but then made the school boy error of deciding to wait for our next loan installment before buying tickets, so you can imagine my disappointment when I went on the Leadmill website to find it had sold out. 😦
I was determined I was going to see them live though, so I kept checking back on the Leadmill website and was lucky enough to find that a few weeks ago there were suddenly two tickets available. Obviously I brought them without a second thought and this is my review of our time seeing them.
Just look at that beautiful face. If that’s not enough to make you want to see Bastille live though then seriously, go download the album because that should do it.
(Just want to add, that photo isn’t mine it’s from here.)
After listening to their debut album ‘Bad Blood’ on repeat constantly in the run up to their gig, I was even more excited. And they certainly didn’t disappoint.
This was the first time I’d been to Leadmill to see a live band, so it seemed really strange seeing it at full capacity, and with us barely able to fight our way through the crowd to get a decent view we definitely regretted not arriving earlier. Coming on stage to an excited and impatient crowd at around 9.30pm, Bastille began with their album’s title track Bad Blood, which called for a major sing along from the crowd and got everyone in the mood. They then went on to play nearly their entire album, plus those such as ‘Poet’ and ‘Sleepsong’ that older fans of the band will know.
My favourite song of theirs is probably ‘Things we lost in the flames’, it’s a ballad track from the album, and hearing it live literally gave me goosebumps. The lead singer Dan Smith, sounds equally as good live if not even better than on the album. ‘Overjoyed’ and ‘Oblivion’ were also amongst my favourites to be performed, with everyone singing along to every word.
They even surprised everyone with a brilliant cover of City High’s ‘What Would You Do?’, this was definitely one of the highlights as with so many of the crowd knowing the song and being clearly impressed at their choice of cover, the atmosphere was amazing.
Unfortunately my camera has been playing up so I was unable to get the quality of pictures and videos that I’d hoped for, but my phone camera isn’t too bad so here’s a clip of it.
They ended on ‘Pompeii’, their number one single at the time and then returned to play another couple of songs, ending on crowd favourite and debut single ‘Flaws.’
Pompeii. (Please excuse my singing)
So yeah, if you get the chance (and they’re playing festivals such as Leeds/Reading) then I highly recommend this band.
Shuffle 