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It’s been a good summer for Bicep. The dance duo – consisting of Northern Irish childhood friends Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar – have seemingly been everywhere this year. They’ve played Glastonbury, twice. They’ve played Hideout Festival and toured North America.
Now, they’ve come back to London, where they first formed in 2009, to kick off two weeks of sets from some of the UK’s biggest electronic music artists in Finsbury Park.
And as the summer sun – finally out in force – blazed down on the stage, partygoers descended for an epic four-hour set that saw the pair mix the deepest of techno cuts with touches of acid, drum and bass and garage.
This wasn’t Bicep live, per se. This was a variation of their Chroma DJ set, which they’ve been touring since September 2023. But while those are usually two hours long, this was a monster four-hour performance, and accordingly, they brought the hits and the visuals to match.
As befitting the mellow afternoon vibe, things started slowly. Cuts of Jeigo’s new house song N.W.I.N were mixed in alongside remixed tracks of Sunhatch’s Come Feel the Love and Talal’s Nomad: perfect for waving beers along to, or indeed sitting on the slopes around the stage and watching from afar, as many did.
Things kicked off properly around the one-hour mark, with the first big Bicep song: their 2022 hit Water, which had people rushing to the stage to dance along. But for the most part, their own tracks were few and far between, at least at the start: this was the duo at their most relaxed and experimental, showcasing the impressive range of the stuff they listened to, which gradually ramped up in intensity as the light faded.
There was a trippy acid song, complete with equally trippy visuals to match. And the garage-flavoured Plus One by Irish artist Bonk, and a version of Modeā’s Shine, which featured a sternum-rattling bassline.
There was plenty of breakbeat and electronica, courtesy of up-and-comers Overmono, including their remix of the iconic Tessela track Hackney Parrot (which Joy Orbison, on before Bicep, had debuted a version of too).
As the sun dipped below the horizon, Chroma’s impressive visual display finally came into its own. Lasers, theatrical smoke and the three screens behind the artists (which shuffled through a range of images to match whichever songs were being played) beamed out into the night.
Here was their own material out in force at last – much of it newly-released tracks that they also played at Glastonbury a month earlier. There was Rola, and L.A.V.A; Bicep’s remix of Raffa Guido song Famax and their track Helium, as well as unreleased tracks, which they’d been sprinkling throughout the entire set.
And finally, there was Glue, the track they close out their sets with – only this time they didn’t. As hands stretched to the dark sky and thumbs jabbed the record button on hundreds of phones, Bicep had one more trick to play, instead mixing in an unreleased drum and bass flavoured track before the lights faded to black.
It was a masterclass in electronic music from some of the biggest names in the game: a perfect blast of festival hedonism to go with the London sunshine.
