Live review: Good grief! Bastille build pop brilliance from the rubble of dead tech
The things we lost in the technical issues could never take away from Bastille’s emphatic Yorkshire takeover.
Dan Smith and his crew took to closing the Halifax Piece Hall’s summer show series, leaving a hoard of fans happier than ever.
Yet if Bastille's gig at the breathtaking venue proved anything, it’s that a dying keyboard and a frontman on strict vocal rest are merely fuel for a genuinely brilliant, joyously unhinged night.
Taking to a stage recently warmed up by hardcore heavyweights Turnstile, a fact Dan Smith enthusiastically geeked out over, praising the sheer majesty of the historic venue, the band launched into the towering hooks of Things We Lost in the Fire and the melancholic feel-good anthem Good Grief.
The atmosphere was instantly electric within the bustling courtyard, as the Yorkshire crowd was undeniably buzzing with that palpable, end-of-the-week euphoria.
But then, the tech gremlins woke up.
By the time the brassy swagger of Send Them Off! kicked in, Kyle Simmons’ keyboard promptly gave up the ghost, aborting the track midway through the first verse.
In a lesser band's hands, this is where the momentum of the show completely flatlines.
For Bastille, it was a cue to go delightfully off script.
With Simmons’ rig undergoing emergency onstage surgery, Smith bounded over to the piano to deliver a makeshift, stripped-back rendition of Laura Palmer, followed by a gorgeously reworked alternate arrangement of Flaws.
The crowd, rather than growing restless, absolutely loved the unique pivot.
It’s no secret that Smith has historically wrestled with the anxieties of being a frontman, but you wouldn’t have known it here in the moment.
He commanded the disarray with self-deprecating British charm, frustrated by the hitches because, frankly, he just wanted to talk.
Having been subjected to a miserable week of silent vocal rest, Smith confessed, "I f****** like to chat," letting his pent-up energy bleed into an increasingly unpredictable setlist and complaining about how "f****** annoying" the forced vow of silence had been on him.
That blistering unpredictability peaked during the scintillating Oblivion, which somehow birthed spontaneous snippets of World Gone Mad before taking to a surreal, utterly superb detouring tribute to Dolly Parton’s Jolene and I Will Always Love You.
It’s not exactly standard Piece Hall fare, but the crowd was beaming ear to ear.
From there, it was a sprint through the band's sprawling, genre-hopping catalogue.
We got the frantic punk-like energy of WHAT YOU GONNA DO???, the synth-soaked doom-scrolling capsule of Doom Days, and a heavy nod to their legendary Other People's Heartache mixtape era.
A massive mashup of Adagio for Strings, TLC’s No Angels, and Corona's Of the Night transformed the historic courtyard into a 90s club utopia.
Amidst the lengthy, towering anthems, Smith treated the Halifax faithful to a brand-new, unreleased track, warning the antedating fans there wasn't a recording of it out in the wild yet, while generously giving everyone full permission to just "feel free to sing old songs" if they weren't ready to learn new lyrics on the fly.
By the time the finale rolled around, the sheer resilience of the band was undeniable.
After bouncing through the Marshmello mega-collab Happier and a cathartic SAVE MY SOUL, the night closed exactly as it had to: with the generational anthem of the 2010s, Pompeii.
With Simmons relegated to playing Dan’s piano because his own rig was still presumably in a long-lasting coma, the track erupted into the pearlescent night sky.
As the crowd filed out, loudly buzzing about how good the band sounded despite the hurdles, it was abashedly obvious: Bastille didn't just survive the glitches bestowed upon them; they weaponized them, delivering a deeply human, joyously triumphant masterclass in the survival of a live performance.