The Wombats are a band that I have always adored, so it was with a tantalising wave of excitement that I arrived at Sheffield’s O2 Academy for a night of raucous tunes and thrown pint pots.
‘Kill The Director’ is one of the defining songs of my early adulthood and it sounds enormous here. As I look around and see glow sticks and short skirts, wristbands and hipster glasses, I realise that for most of the people around me, this is just another song. While my back was turned, the Wombats have acquired a whole new set of fans…
‘Techno Fan’ is a song that should have been way bigger, and it sounds suitably anthemic tonight. Wombats vocalist Matt Murphy has always seemed happiest out of the limelight, allowing his songs to do the talking and his on-stage patter is kept to a minimum.
‘Lemon to a Knife Fight’ is already a quintessential Wombats single and it sounds even better live without the overly clean production. An incendiary ‘Let’s Dance to Joy Division’ closes out the first part of the set, complete with actual dancing Wombats, and it transports me to a million indie clubs on a million student nights with a million pints of snakebite and black threatening to burst out of my oesophagus like a grotesque, multi-coloured Xenomorph.
The band return to the stage for ‘Tokyo (Vampires and Wolves)’ before ‘Greek Tragedy’ concludes an energetic set. We leave with the last vestiges of another classic song ringing in our ears, out into the drizzly but vibrant Sheffield night. There’s life in the old marsupials yet…
