Kaiser Chiefs - Royal Festival Hall

Caught a great Friday night show with The Kaiser Chiefs at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall as part of a week-long Teenage Cancer Trust series of concerts. I’ve really been digging their recently released second album ‘Yours Truly, Angry Mob’ so it was great to hear some of the new songs live.

The show kicked off with a few employments tracks “Saturday Night” (with one of my favorite Kaiser Chief’s lines: “we are Birds of a Feather / and you can be the fat one”) and “Everyday I Love You Less and Less”.

Before they jumped into the new material. The seemingly ubiquitous first single “Ruby” went down a treat, but I really enjoyed “Heat Dies Down” and “Highroyds”. Also great to hear the not often played b-side “Take My Temperature”.

I was a bit surprised having a new album to draw from didn’t change the set dramatically from the earlier ‘Employment’ show we saw at Brixton Academy last year – but I guess having only two albums to draw from still limits the song selection somewhat.

My only criticism of the night was how poorly the venue seemed to suit the majority of the crowd. We might have been unlucky, but seemed to be flanked in boxes on either side of our own by drunk bankers/accountants. It may have more to do with this being a Friday night show – so many people simply kicked-on from after work drinks, however I do suspect having a top 10 hit (the aforementioned “Ruby”) does lead to a band drawing a less selective audience (case in point, one of the “bankers” to our right, who at one stage decided to go topless, continued to call out for “ruby, ruby, ruby” despite the band having already played the song).
Anyway – this minor criticism aside, the show was great and much of the new material – in particular the title track “Angry Mob” which opened the only encore – sounded just fantastic in live performance.