Twenty One Pilots’ Clancy World Tour is the end of an ongoing saga that started with 2015’s ‘Blurryface’, an album which swiftly transformed the duo from quirky emo outsiders into one of the biggest bands on the planet.
As you’d expect from a group who still confidently wear that crown, tonight’s gig at London’s O2 Arena is outrageously massive. Fireworks regularly erupt from across the stage; moving video screens pepper the two-hour show with a cinematic dystopian narrative about rebellious freedom, and on two separate occasions, Tyler Joseph and Josh Dunn disappear from the stage and suddenly reappear at the opposite end of the cavernous venue as if by magic.
Crossover megahits ‘Stressed Out’, ‘Ride’ and ‘The Line’ demand a suitably gigantic reaction from the sold-out crowd, while the pair try their hand at stadium rock for a menacing ‘Heathens’ and the wonderfully unhinged ‘Next Semester’. Later, Tyler turns the audience into a four-part DIY light show for ‘Mulberry Street’ as the set comfortably weaves between club euphoria and polished pop escapism.
The real magic is how intimate Twenty One Pilots make The O2 feel, though. By the second song, Tyler is actually standing on top of the audience, and later, the pair strut through the crowd for the shimmering ‘Routines In The Night‘. They repeat this trick several more times as the night goes on, handing out fist bumps and high-fives as they go. Young fan Skyler joins them on the stages set up in the middle of the venue to holler the chorus of ‘Ride’ while ‘The Judge’ starts with a video of fans hanging outside the O2, boasting about the community and creativity that Twenty One Pilots inspire. “This show means so much to me,” Tyler says later before thanking the room for making him feel at home.
There are plenty of Easter Eggs for the diehards to dissect on Reddit, like why Tyler waits so long to put on the Clancy jacket and what the terrifying end of the tender ‘Paladin Strait’ really means, but Twenty One Pilots never get bogged down in their own legacy. The pair skip about the stage to ‘Lavish’ and aren’t afraid of cracking jokes either, despite raw songs about anxiety, fear and uncertainty making up the bulk of the set.
The dance between intimate connection and bombastic rock show comes to a head at the very end of the night. ‘Midwest Indigo’ sees the pair throwing themselves about the stage like they’re still practising in a garage somewhere in Ohio, while ‘Trees’ has them relocate their instruments to the very middle of the pit. It’s the sort of thing you might see in a grubby basement venue, but the band makes it work in this 20,000-capacity arena. As that celebratory chorus kicks in, the entire place moves as one and their motto of, “We are Twenty One Pilots, and so are you” has never felt more brilliantly accurate.
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