Their day job may involve playing at thunderous volume to huge arena crowds and heavy rock festivals, but Scottish trio Biffy Clyro have always had a softer, warmer, more melodic side. Reverberating around the glorious vaulted interior of St-John-at-Hackney church, a Grade II listed landmark dating back to 1792, this intimate London gig was a rare acoustic performance for a select audience of competition winners, which was recorded and filmed for broadcast this weekend. The unplugged arrangements were fairly tame by the Kilmarnock trio’s usual guitar-scraping, drum-clobbering standards, but in truth they have been pursuing a shamelessly soppy emo-pop direction for many years now. Their chart-topping 2020 album A Celebration of Endings even featured Steve “Mac” McCutcheon, a songwriter and producer famed for his work with Westlife and Ed Sheeran.
Extravagantly bearded singer Simon Neil, backed by twin brothers James and Ben Johnston plus two additional players, remained in softly-strumming-busker mode throughout this compact set, his grainy Ayrshire brogue drawing more from country and folk than hard rock. Almost half of this hour-long concert consisted of material from A Celebration of Endings and its 2021 sister album, The Myth of the Happily Ever After, including opening number Instant History, a galloping guitar-jangler that sounded a little anaemic until the crowd jumped in to carry the soaring chorus aloft. Neil pushed his falsetto croon to breaking point on Haru Urara, a winsome finger-picking lament named after a notoriously unsuccessful Japanese racehorse. The tumbling piano ballad Existedand the romantic serenade Space, which the singer performed solo, were both effective tear-jerkers with a slightly cloying edge. Seemingly devoid of any irony or nuance, Biffy Clyro consistently wear their hearts on their sleeves. This earnestness can be both weakness and strength.
Perhaps inevitably, it was the trio’s gentler, sweeter songs that worked best in this muted acoustic format. The pastel-shaded, helium-voiced Rearrange trembled with spine-tingling emotion while the honky-tonk saloon-bar toe-tapperSmall Wishes was a pleasing reminder that country and western is deeply embedded all across Scotland’s west coast. But more cinematic numbers, from the churning heartbreak waltz Oppositeto the galloping arena anthem Bubbles, felt slightly too anodyne in these bloodless, rootsy arrangements.
In long established tradition, Biffy Clyro closed this show with their 2010 hit single Many of Horror, whose mountainous chorus earned a reliably lusty sing-along from the excitable crowd. The borderline between the trio’s pop and rock, restrained and raucous, Jekyll and Hyde incarnations has become increasingly porous in recent years, especially in their more typical festival-headliner mode. But this fairly conservative, overly wholesome performance could have benefited from a few more spiky, discordant touches. These versatile shape-shifting Scots have mastered the emo-pop form, they now need to grasp the importance of not being earnest.
