The Royal Albert Hall doesn’t exactly scream ’Monday night rave’. Yet that’s exactly what happened last night, as Karl Hyde and Rick Smith – aka Underworld – kicked off a week of concerts in Kensington Gore to raise funds for the Teenage Cancer Trust.
Underworld’s performance was a world away from the genteel entertainment the Hall was built for – though there’s something quite Victorian about Hyde’s pantomime-like dancing. The room was packed full of millennials eager to relive their Nineties heyday alongside parents keen to show their kids how cool they once were. Over the course of the night, the same children who think dad dancing is a criminal offence were gyrating to the songs from the Trainspotting soundtrack.
Such is the magic of Underworld: a knack for bridging the old and the new. Their latest album, Drift Series 1, was acclaimed for reviving the very sound that made them famous: maximalist techno that draws effusive crowd-pleasers together with dark, baseline-heavy tracks. In that category, Push Upstairs and Dark Train were particularly strong last night.
But it was a slow start. A vaporous smog shrouded the stage for what seemed like half an hour before the duo walked on from the side. Why blow all that smoke onto the stage if you’re not going to emerge from it?
They then performed one of their newer, more niche tracks. Hyde’s microphone was poorly tuned, and his words were muffled by the reverberations of Smith’s keys. It’s a shame, as lyrics are among Underworld’s greatest strengths – and with no one to sing or dance along as they might have done for a known hit, the first 10 minutes of the night fell oddly flat.
They bounced back soon enough, though, launching into Juanita – easily their best song – now with fully functioning equipment. Hyde delivered his psychedelic verse with aplomb, and people were on their feet in no time. Tracks were either blended into the next segment or rounded off with a bang – Underworld structuring their set like the symphonies more commonly heard in SW7.
But truly it was the crowd that brought the concert to life – like a school disco on acid. Bodies collided, beers flew and a woman in the row in front of me leapt like a frog for five minutes after hearing the opening chords of King of Snake (perhaps she had confused reptiles with amphibians).
Unleashing that kind of energy at the same charity concert that’s welcomed Paul McCartney, Ed Sheeran and both Gallaghers (separately) is no mean feat. With those former headliners declining to perform at the King’s Coronation, this could be Underworld’s chance.
