“If you want my body and you think I'm sexy, come on sugar tell me so,” Ezra Koening shrieked. Yes, the Vampire Weekend frontman took requests from a jubilant Brixton Academy crowd during this week’s gig.
“We used to take Vampire Weekend requests but that got too easy," Koening told the audience. "Now we'll take anything but Vampire Weekend requests."
After two hours of the indie giants playing their greatest hits, alongside tracks from their grittier new album Only God Was Above Us, the crowd was also treated to the likes of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, and The Clash’s The Guns of Brixton.
A funked-up version of The Beatles’ Twist and Shout sent the dads go crazy before the band returned to their own catalogue for final encore songs, Worship You and Ya Hey.
It’s been 16 years since the New York band released their first album. But if the nearly 5,000-strong crowd had aged, Koening didn’t appear a day older than when Vampire Weekend first released hits like A-Punk and Oxford Comma. Dressed all in white, and looking ever-so-slightly like a wedding band, they began their set with a laid-back version of the grammar-themed hit.
Memories of top buttoned polo shirts and rolled-up trousers quickly followed as the band launched onto Campus before a surprise curtain drop showed the band had also brought all their toys along. A huge set was decked out with two drum kits, spring-motion stage lights on suspended scissor lifts and what looked like three pianos.
“We last played here in February 2010,” Koening told the crowd, and clearly from the screeches, some of the crowd had been there too. The band has had an entirely updated setlist since then, with their most recent album being described by the smooth-talking frontman as their “most aggressive so far”.
As well as playing all the fan favourites, Vampire Weekend subverted preppy expectations with a long version of SBTRKT track New York New Dorp, on which Koenig features as a vocalist, as well as forgotten numbers from their fourth album Father of the Bride, which was released in 2019 months before the Covid pandemic. If the How Long lyric “Why’s it felt like Halloween since Christmas 2017” resonated then, it’s definitely become even richer in meaning since.
Rounding the night off with Hope, a ballad from the new album, the boys bathed Brixton in scattered disco ball light as they proved once and for all that Vampire Weekend is back from the dead. Or maybe they were never dead at all.
