LIVE REVIEW: The Wombats, Everything Everything, Motorpoint Arena, Nottingham, 18/03/2025
Photo Credit: Jack Delve (19th March – O2 Arena, London)
The Wombats are a staple of indie music in the 21st century, with tracks from 2007’s A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation still being some of the biggest singalongs in any indie night you’ll find. Coming off the back of their melodic new record, Oh! The Ocean, the band are embarking on their biggest arena tour yet, and with support from Everything Everything, it’s a dream night out for any fan of the genre.
Kicking off the festivities, alternative indie/art rock outfit Everything Everything welcomed a pretty full Motorpoint Arena with a selection of tracks, predominantly from their 2024 effort, Mountainhead, released just over a year ago. For context, Everything Everything are a band that have been around for 10+ years and had much success in their own right and to see them supporting in an arena setting shows off just how great a gig this is on paper as the Manchester band aren’t miles off arena settings themselves.
However, the gig itself was slightly lacklustre. Evidently, they were playing to a Wombats crowd with a few Everything Everything fans at the front, but the stage presence was next to nothing and there was little to no crowd engagement. We were attending with some friends who had never heard of the band, and they mooched off to the bar twenty minutes in, as the band were seemingly struggling to capture people’s attention as the soft murmuring of crowd chatter seemingly soundtracked the majority of their performance.
Musically, you couldn’t fault them as they sounded great and despite the levels of difficulty some from some of high pitch vocal performances, Jonathan Higgs excelled, he was clear and faultless. A highlight of the gig would have been the No Reptiles finale, with clever lighting really helping build a huge finale to a song that builds and builds, but sadly the thirty-five minutes or so of build up before didn’t quite cut it. 6/10
Onto the main event, The Wombats began ten minutes late with the aptly titled track, Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come – a slightly strange message to send your audience and it’s hard to tell if the band were aware of the irony, hopefully it was just a bad joke. Quickly, the band moved onto the tracks the audience were here for, the iconic indie anthem, Moving to New York, got everyone moving as you’d anticipate, while favourites Cheetah Tongue and Techno Fan proceeded to keep the party going.
That was the story of the set with fan favourites littered in between tracks from the new record that the crowd didn’t really seem to engage with while little investment in visuals and production made the lows pretty low as people stood around not knowing the tracks. The seven tracks from the more melodic Oh! The Ocean perhaps didn’t suit the majority of fans who preferred the band’s earlier work or older fans who had maybe not listened to the record but that’s on them at the end of the day!
A highlight of the set was lead singer Matthew Murphy’s solo rendition of a Lethal Combination, culminating in countless lights around the arena being raised. Throughout the gig, the talent of all three musicians is very clear to see, and considering this is the first gig of the tour, there was no evidence of any hiccups whatsoever.
Finishing the set strong, the band naturally saved the biggest hits until last with Let’s Dance to Joy Division. This was probably the highlight of the set and it’s refreshing to see the passion the band have for playing this track live as after playing it probably a thousand odd times, you’d think it would only be natural to lose the love for playing this track. The traditional people in wombat costumes came dancing onto the stage for this track, and we may be just being grumpy, but we really don’t see the point of them, it all just feels a bit childish but then again, the band do also have a younger audience demographic.
Onto the encore after a big finale to the set, The World’s Not Out to Get Me, I Am, brings things down a notch but Turn brings things back up to the previous level of energy with one of the best nostalgia filling choruses in music. The big balloons placed above everyone’s heads that had seemingly been waiting for days had finally dropped, leaving a nice colourful aesthetic while the band finished on Greek Tragedy, but we think people were too busy playing with the balloons to notice! But they were quite fun to hit…
Overall, it was a good gig but nothing to write home about. When bands step up to arenas, you really think their production should step up a notch. This is particularly apparent when you’re playing a lot of lesser-known tracks in your set, you’ve got to invest in some visuals to keep the crowd engaged as it’s easy to end up just flicking through your phone during a track you’re not really vibing with.
The highs of this gig were high but you just feel on their next arena tour, people in wombat costumes and a load of balloons feels a bit lazy, and when you look at the likes of what other bands who’ve stepped up to arena level do, the putting on a show element is just as important as playing your tracks to the best of your ability. 6/10
Written by: Joe Loughran
