Elbow live in Manchester: a belated, but brilliant opening of the Co-Op Live

After three weeks of chaos and delays, tonight Elbow are the first act to play Co-Op Live, the UK’s biggest arena with a capacity of 23,500. Addressing the crowd before playing the luscious indie-waltz of ‘The Bones of You’, hometown hero frontman Guy Garvey says: “Everybody who’s been working on this building has been so excited today – so nervous and excited – and there was already electricity in the air before you got in here, and now it’s been thoroughly amped up.”

The Bury band were actually the fifteenth event scheduled to take place at Co-Op Live, but numerous high-profile setbacks have seen it compared to Manchester’s version of the Fyre Festival and dubbed ‘Co-Flop Live’. Added to that, there’s the sobering juxtaposition of the city getting another enormodome in a climate where grassroots venues – which provide the key pipeline for arena-filling acts – are imperilled. This situation wasn’t helped by an executive director, who has now resigned, dismissing calls for a vital £1 ticket levy on all gigs arena-sized and above, while ironically claiming that some smaller venues are “poorly run”. The owners have since agreed to discuss the idea with the Music Venue Trust. Attracting high-profile shows like the MTV Awards to the city also comes at a time when spiralling rents are pricing young bands out of Manchester, and gentrification sees city centre venues like Night & Day threatened.

Given the doggedly bad PR, expectations were so low, that if you make it through the gig without an air-conditioning unit falling from the ceiling onto your head, it might be considered a bonus. Inside, it’s sleekly pretty much the same as any other arena, albeit with a top-notch sound system. And, if there’s one band who can comfortably cut through the flux, it’s Elbow, who’ve spent ten albums defying expectations to emerge as national treasures. Dropped by their record label, they responded with 2008 Mercury Music Prize-winning ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ and the ubiquitous anthem ‘One Day Like This’, and have spent the next six albums forging forward creatively and resisting repeating that formula.

“Let’s open this venue properly!”, commands Garvey as Elbow raise the curtain with the jazzy croon of ‘Things I’ve Been Telling Myself for Years’ and the proggy samba-inflected ‘Lover’s Leap’ off new album ‘Audio Vertigo’ – and a brass section digs fully into the record’s Garvey-described “seedy, gnarly grooves”.  It’s a night of emphatic character studies, big-hearted sincerity, and tracks brimming with needling details, particularly  on the synth-driven ‘Balu’, a barstool-bard tribute to hedonistic friends, while the likes of ‘Station Approach’ are shot through with the DNA of the city.

Garvey is a reliably charismatic presence, cajoling shimmering fingers during ‘Mirrorball’ (which is accompanied by a glitterball descending from the ceiling) dropping references to local haunts like Oxford Road bar Big Hands, joking that his hair resembles Swiss Toni (“Playing a hometown crowd is like making love to a beautiful woman”, he quips in reference to the Charlie Higson character), and marshalling different sections of the crown into harmonising on the rollicking ‘Grounds for Divorce’. Before the sumptuous sorrow of ‘My Sad Captains’, he asks: ‘What do we make of this amazing room everybody? How do you feel about christening it?”

Encoring with ‘Lippy Kids’, a beautiful evocation of the piss and vinegar of adolescence that is transformed into a sing-a-long juggernaut, Garvey teases: “You’ve house warmed this beautiful new venue. Shall we sing one last song together? Anyone got any ideas? It’s got to be something unifying…sang in a northern accent from the heart. It’s got to mention soft-furnishings”, before ‘One Day Like This’ suitably brings the house – but thankfully not the air conditioning units – down, as the last tumultuous three weeks are washed away.

Elbow played: 

‘Things I’ve Been Telling Myself for Years’
‘Lovers’ Leap’
‘The Bones of You’
‘Mirrorball’
‘Charge’
‘Fly Boy Blue / Lunette’
‘The Picture’
‘Dexter & Sinister’
‘Balu’
‘Puncture Repair’
‘Kindling’
‘The Birds’
‘Good Blood Mexico City’
‘Station Approach’
‘My Sad Captains’
‘Magnificent (She Says)’
‘Grounds for Divorce’
‘Lippy Kids’
‘One Day Like This’

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