When Simon Neil started sweating in the opening song, that was the moment you knew. Not nerves — Biffy Clyro don’t do nerves — but pure, full-throttle commitment. From the very first note of ‘A Little Love’, the opening track from their latest album Futique, it was clear this wasn’t going to be a band going through the motions. Eight years is a long time to wait for a band of this calibre to come back to Aotearoa, and they played every single second of it.
Before any of that, though, Auckland had its own moment. Coast Arcade — the homegrown four-piece of singer-guitarist Bella Bavin, drummer Thom Boynton, bassist Leo Spykerman and guitarist Arlo Birss — opened the night and made absolutely sure nobody was looking at their phone. The Auckland Town Hall is a big room to fill as a support act, but Coast Arcade have been earning their stripes on stages across New Zealand and beyond since forming straight out of high school in 2021, and it showed. Their roaring, guitar-driven indie rock — raised on Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and the best of 90s alt-rock — was the perfect warm-up for what was to come, and the crowd responded warmly. This is a band on the rise, and a support slot with Biffy Clyro is exactly the kind of stage they’re ready for.
Auckland Town Hall is a special room for a rock show — the acoustics wrap around you in a way that makes everything feel enormous and intimate at the same time — and there’s something particularly brilliant about watching a band this loud and this unrestrained perform in front of the venue’s famous pipe organ. That grand, centuries-old backdrop somehow made everything hit harder, the contrast between classical grandeur and full-tilt rock and roll adding something extra to every song. Biffy Clyro understood the assignment immediately. ‘Hunting Season’ followed the opener, then ‘That Golden Rule’, and by the time ‘Who’s Got a Match?’ arrived the room was already moving as one — people on shoulders, arms in the air, the whole crowd clapping in unison like they’d rehearsed it. The energy in that room from the first song to the last was something else entirely.
The middle section of the set was relentless in the best possible way. ‘Space’, ‘Wolves of Winter’, ‘Tiny Indoor Fireworks’ — each one landing harder than the last. The moshpit up front was a joyful, chaotic blur throughout, the kind where everyone checks on each other and grins about it. ‘Goodbye’ brought a brief moment to breathe before ‘Friendshipping’ tore the room open again. ‘Biblical’ was enormous. ‘A Thousand and One’ and ‘Different People’ reminded everyone why this band’s back catalogue is so extraordinarily deep. And ‘Black Chandelier’ — well, if you were anywhere near the front for that one, you’ll know.
The good vibes throughout were impossible to ignore. This wasn’t just a crowd that had turned up to watch — this was a room full of people who had been waiting eight years for this, and they were making absolutely sure the band knew it. Simon Neil certainly did. The man barely stopped grinning.
The encore was the stuff of rock show legend. ‘Machines’ into ‘The Captain’ into ‘Living Is a Problem Because Everything Dies’ into ‘Bubbles’ — each one a different kind of emotional gut-punch — before closing on ‘Many of Horror’. A song that, backdropped by that magnificent organ, in a venue like Auckland Town Hall, with a crowd that’s been waiting eight years to hear it live, becomes something genuinely transcendent. Hundreds of people singing every word back at the stage. Simon Neil sweating through every note. The band knowing exactly what they’d given this room and this city.
If this is the last time Biffy Clyro come to New Zealand, we’ll all be talking about this night for a very long time. If they come back sooner — and they really should — the bar has been set impossibly high.
0 Comments