Blacks Keys rock a heart at the Ally Pally

Like most people who spent the better half of their teenage years during the mid-noughties, my music tastes were fairly rigidly constrained to the world of indie rock. My iTunes library was full of guitar bands and the ideal school night involved necking a few tins, getting on the train and sweating copious amounts in the poorly ventilated gig venues of Leeds. These days there are maybe three guitar bands that I pay any real attention to, with the rest of my attention falling on the world of electronic and hip hop music. Thinking about it, I’ve probably been to two gigs featuring bands playing ‘actual instruments’ in the past year. Perhaps this makes me less qualified to comment on this whole thing, perhaps it makes me more so, perhaps I couldn’t give a tuppeny fuck either way.

Regardless, there I was last Saturday being presented with a ticket to see the current kings of blues rock – The Black Keys. It was a gig I’d been meaning to get tickets to for ages, yet never followed through. Luckily though, my girlfriend decided to excel herself and mop up my incompetence, purchasing a couple of tickets and surprising me.

We rocked up to Alexandra Palace and, wincing, I immediately sunk fifteen quid on a couple of drinks. As we made our way into the main room to see warm-up act Band of Skulls, one thing became glaringly apparent: the crowd, generally speaking, were pretty short. It turned out that the gig was a 14+ event, something I’m not sure even existed when I was a young ‘un. The depressing feeling that I was potentially almost a decade older than some of them was balanced by the fact that I was guaranteed a cracking view.

Band of Skullsdelivered a solid performance, occasionally coaxing the crowd into movement beyond default head-nodding. Not being hugely aware of Band of Skulls myself, their brand of ballsy rock was tight and produced several stand-out numbers.

As the clock approached half nine, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney a.k.a. The Black Keys led the band onto the stage, their unconventional setup belying where the strengths of the band lay. Usually, the drummer is hidden away at the back; here, Patrick assumed his raised position, centre stage behind his kit, Dan to the right with bassist Gus Seyffert and keyboardist John Wood behind. The band delivered the kick of a donkey as they started with songs from 2010’s album, Brothers. Unfortunately it took a while for the crowd to respond and I began to worry that this younger generation of rock fans had lost the art of ‘losing your shit’. Thankfully, all it took was the rendition of an effort from The Black Keys’ most recent album, El Camino, to whip the kids up into a fury. I would like to note at this point that we hadn’t just gatecrashed some underage gig, but as at most gigs there was an (in this case significant) age gradient away from the stage, and we’d managed to get quite close to the front.

The next hour was crammed with driving blues-rock rhythms, interspersed with some of the gentler efforts from El Camino and others from their earlier albums including decade-old debut The Big Come Up. As they left the stage to play the ‘How long can we keep the audience waiting while we sip Champagne?’ game, I was left hoping that when they inevitably returned the encore would just keep going. As it was, their following rendition of ‘Everlasting Light’ left me in awe as beams of white light exploded out from the enormous mirror ball suddenly suspended above the stage. They finished the gig with a couple more songs as the words “THE BLACK KEYS” lit up in incandescent bulbs above the band’s heads.

To say this was the most fun I’d had at a rock gig for a long time wouldn’t really mean much. To say this was the most fun I’ve had at any gig for a long time might mean more. Either way it was great to remember how much fun I used to have in those grimy venues in Leeds and that I’m not too old to get stuck into a ‘pit’ every once in a while.