For most bands, appearing at both the Leeds and Reading festivals would constitute a busy weekend. Biffy Clyro, the grizzly Kilmarnock three-piece who spent two decades dutifully slogging their way towards rock’s top tier while avoiding creating music that sounds remotely workmanlike, are clearly cut from a different cloth. Their nominal day off between headline slots involves jetting home to Scotland to perform their biggest single headline show to date, a sold-out maxi-gig in a leafy Glasgow park for 35,000 fans.
If their current doughty work rate is admirable, the trio did, nevertheless, take all of 2015 off. From an industry viewpoint, it was a risky move, coming so soon after achieving their first number one with 2013’s Opposites, even if that sprawling double album was perceived by some as being pretty iffy. But the furlough has demonstrably failed to dent the band’s wider appeal: their spry, slimline seventh album, Ellipsis, came out last month and promptly topped the chart.
Biffy’s hardcore fanbase have clearly remained devoted. Huge sections of the audience are lustily word-perfect on the spirited opener, Wolves of Winter, a new song that marries nervy power chords with a shining chorus fit for a football terrace. It is a precarious but undeniably effective formula that recurs over the course of this triumphant two-hour set: unpredictable time signatures and queasy chord changes are pressed into service to create cumulatively cathartic anthems. There’s even scope for some additional tinkering on the fly, as singer-guitarist Simon Neil drops a line from Flower of Scotland into the angular strains of Living Is a Problem Because Everything Dies.
Despite emphatically qualifying for the Champions League of arena rock, Biffy’s staging remains relatively restrained. Instead of lasers and confetti cannons, their special effects are their own heavily inked muscles. Twin brothers James and Ben Johnston, on bass and drums respectively, are stripped to the waist from the outset, while it takes a whole five songs for Neil to shuck off his top.
Among their stacked catalogue of juddering riffage, the relatively restrained emo chugger Black Chandelier seems perhaps their most loved song, judging by the glowing forest of raised smartphones that greets its chiming guitar-figure opening. It is only eclipsed by the reaction to Many of Horror, the anguished ballad clumsily commandeered and reclassified as When We Collide by 2010 X Factor champ Matt Cardle.
After hearing their biggest hit sung en masse back to him, Neil seems genuinely moved. “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve heard in my life,” he says, from behind a curtain of Captain Caveman hair.
Biffy Clyro have clambered to the highest level of success with very little compromise, following their own gnarly, complex muse while proudly singing in Scottish accents. They finish with Stingin’ Belle, a fidgety collision of synchronised thrash and soaring melody accompanied by actual fireworks. It feels like a coronation, and a treat.
