You Me At Six + The Spill Canvas + Emarosa @ Birmingham Academy – 7th March 2009
The second date on the sold out ‘777 tour’, You Me at Six supported by Emarosa and The Spill Canvas at the O2 Academy was set to be an awesome show. The line to get in tonight was enormous some fans lining up in the cold from 9am!
I heard complaints that the show had started and people half way back in the line had missed the first half of Emarosa’s set.
Emarosa looked like a tired band from either partying too hard or jet lag – I think I’m going to go with my first assumption – however the band performed an energetic set, playing songs from 2008’s album Relativity. The vocals could have been louder, and proved a major problem with tonight’s show… Emarosa played a good set, however I felt more effort could have been put in to the performance.
The next band up were South Dakota’s The Spill Canvas, this band gave it their all tonight coming across very energetic on stage. However the crowd was trying to connect with the band but I felt they were just there to play a show, being very distant from the crowd, I felt they were there playing a show for themselves and the crowd were faceless and as much as I like this band… I hate it when bands do that, when they don’t put effort in to connecting to the kids that are singing their songs back.
The band to grace the stage next is a band that has come so far… You Me at Six have now ‘made it’! The intro was atmospheric, there was a curtain hiding the band from the crowd. All I could hear was the constant screaming, people screaming for that curtain to fall. It was looking like a proper show, a full production.
As the curtain fell the crowd erupts You Me at Six looked huge, the light show was fantastic, one thing I noticed was that the band were dressed and acting the same they did last summer on the academy 2 stage, they looked like the sudden fame hadn’t gone to their heads… just yet!
The first half of the show was let down by the academy’s sound, yet the band tried not to let it affect them. The sound was close to being awful tonight, which of course is a shame — if the sound was on form the show would have been not only good, but epic.
Josh (lead singer) worked the crowd perfectly, not one person stood still, all the energy in the crowd was near the front – it looked like mayhem in there.
Slowly but surely You Me at Six became more and more amazing as the evening went on.
The song ‘Always Attract’ was perfect. It felt amazing to hear people singing that song back and everyone in the crowd must have felt a hair tingle for that song.
You Me at Six deserve everything they’ve got, playing the academy is something to be proud of when a year before now they were playing far smaller venues. They came across humble and grateful for the show they played, thanking the crowd for being there, I never thought I’d see them sell out the academy and perform a show to this calibre it was just a shame about the sound tonight.
You me at six are no longer ‘UK’s best kept secret’
Review – Adam Spall
Photos – Keith West