When you’ve seen a band play live 34 times, they can only surprise you so much. Not only do you know the recorded songs intimately, but the nuances of how they perform them live: the singer’s rakish gestures, the guitarists’ live-wire body language, the unexpected moments of violence. But on the second of two nights at Alexandra Palace last week, the National played an entirely different set to the one I had seen the night before: no repeated songs across a performance that lasted two and a half hours.
I had also been to see them in Dublin a week prior, so this set took me into the eighth hour of seeing them live in seven days. Yet, knowing that they had dispensed with most of the hits on Tuesday, on Wednesday I felt like a spoilt kid on Christmas morning as they finished each song: what could possibly come next? They played a sizeable chunk of the 2004 Cherry Tree EP; the furiously bitter Available from their second album, 2003’s Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers; my beloved Lemonworld; songs from their classic albums Alligator and Boxer that I hadn’t heard live in for ever. It was electrifying.
