Kings of Leon perform at the Liverpool Echo Arena _320
SELLING out New York’s Radio City Music Hall was the warm-up.
Headlining Glastonbury was the dress rehearsal.
Last night at the Echo arena was the performance to crown them all.
Tennessee superstars Kings of Leon filled every inch of space with their gritty retro sound, stunning melodies and ringing guitars, extracting whoops of delight and shouts of joy from the capacity crowd.
Performing below three or four split screens which flashed up images throughout, the band played a show nearing two hours and blasted out crowd favourites from their three previous albums, plus new one Only By The Night.
With the likes of the superb Crawl and the insistently chugging Sex On Fire whipping the crowd into an ever-foamier lather, the southern indie rock kids found an affinity with the Liverpool audience.
But this is a band that grew up living out of cars, other people’s homes and trailers, while they travelled across America with their Pentecostal preacher father. Eventually they settled in Nashville and in 2000 they signed a recording contract with RCA in New York.
They are truly a band of brothers – Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill, plus cousin Matthew. Even their name is a reference to family members – both their father and grandfather are called Leon.
Their sound owes a debt to the great rock acts of the 70s – there’s a taste of Led Zeppelin, a hint of Neil Young and a huge wedge of Lynyrd Skynyrd thrown in for good measure.
