As the crowd happily sing along to you me at six and occasionally screaming when someone discarded their unwanted water, they seemed in high spirits.
The band Canterbury, ‘not from Canterbury’ but instead from Aldershot, walk onto Birmingham O2 Academy’s stage to loud screams. Opening their 
set with ‘Peace & Quiet’, the band soon whipped the crowd into a moving frenzy. Allowing the crowd to catch their breath during ‘Gloria’ Mike Sparks then goes on to ask the crowd ‘Who likes to dance?’ before the band launch into the ‘dancey’ Calm Down. And so it is; the crowd become a mass of arms in the air and bobbing heads, and when singers Mike and Luke aren’t attached to their microphones, they too are moving. New single ‘More Than Know’ has now bass player Luke Prebble beaming and bribing the crowd to show them their best moves for a piece of ‘Canterbury rock’ which is an ‘actual piece of rock with our faces’. Getting the crowd to practice their ‘la la la’s’ for final song ‘Friends? We’re More Like a Gang’ has the audience definitely feeling like a gang and definitely warmed up for following supports WATO and headliners TBO.
Another energetic performance comes in the shape of We Are The Ocean. A few eyebrows are raised when scream Dan Brown flounces off to the side
and appears to shout at a roadie after receiving feedback, but returns quickly to open their set with ‘Trouble Is Temporary, Time Is Tonic’ from ‘Go Now and Live’ which perhaps shows the bands transition from their once more scream efforts, to Dan’s now gravelly singing. Third song ‘These Days I Have Nothing’ bought Dan to the barrier and whilst some desperately tried to grab onto him, some stood with what looked like disgust on their faces. Crowd pleaser ‘Nothing Good Has Happened Yet’ had the whole room singing along, and yet again Dan flings himself into the hands of the audience to crowd. If you’re a veteran of rock gigs, you’re mostly likely to know the routine of ‘I wanna see a pit, no, bigger. You can do better than that’ etc. And that’s what singer/screamer Dan Brown does. It appears that Dan enjoys spending a lot of his time in the arms of the crowd, during ‘Confessions’, whilst stood at the barrier signalling with his fingers to split the crowd. Whilst some are wondering if they’re going to have take part in a wall of death, he then jumps into the crowd and partakes in a mosh pit. Ending song ‘the Waiting Room’ spat out a few crowd surfers and a few lines nicely sung song by the crowd.
After the compilation cd of You Me at Six and Bring Me the Horizon had been perhaps played for too long, the crowd seemingly became restless and begin shouting for headlining act The Blackout. Eventually the six piece from Wales come on, with maybe one of the best stage set-ups their tour’s seen. Bounding onto the stage, blonde haired Sean Smith begins screaming “this is our time, this is our life” to which the crowd immediately recognise and reciprocate the screams. Typical of the live version of ‘Save Our Selves,’ Gavin and Sean attempt to make the crowd crouch down, but the odd ones stayed standing, probably hoping that either one of the frontmen would make a spectacle of them as they’ve been known to do to those 
who refuse to crouch. Crowd favourite ‘It’s High Tide Baby!’ had Sean commenting on how this was his favourite show of the tour.’ As ever with The Blackout gigs, both frontmen know how to interact with the crowd and each other, making the audience laugh between songs. “I need you to head bang as hard as you can… We could make a hole in the floor and head for Japan. Or maybe not ‘cause of lava and stuff” Sean comments drawing a few laughs from the young crowd and older, and quite drunk by now, ones stood at the back (near the bar.) “Are you ready to sing” Sean enquires before ‘This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things’, only to receive a somewhat half-hearted ‘woo’ from the crowd, but when he says “that was terrible… stop being miserable Midlanders” the crowd reply with a louder ‘woo’ which he seemed satisfied with. The Blackout then split the room in half to form ‘team Sean Smith’ and ‘Team GB’ to help them sing, a song that had me looking at my watch numerous times, ‘Not Alone.’ “We definitely won that one” Sean beams to his side of the room, whilst Gavin shakes his head and his crowd boo heavily. “When you realised you were all on Gavin’s side” Sean continues “you should have all moved over to the better side.” Just before playing the bands third album’s title track, ‘Hope’ Sean in a rare act of seriousness thanked the audience for getting them where they are. For ‘Children of the Night’ the lights dimmed and the band used torches to illuminate the crowd before trying to create a Mexican wave following the torches. Embracing the Twitter culture, Sean told the crowd to tweet ‘#fucktheblackout.’ Whilst most people got their phones out, I heard one fan say ‘Twitters a load of shit’ and crossed her arms defiantly. Announcing to the room that they were now going to play an old song ‘I’m a riot, you’re a fucking riot’ they urged the (young) fans to raise their middle fingers to the air. The Welsh six piece ended on ‘Higher & Higher’ – the one with the catchy chorus, the one which will get you screaming ‘woo’ along with the band and the one where the audience has Hyro Da Hero’s rap down to a t.
As usual, The Blackout put on yet another impressive show by maintaining their energy through-out the 18 song setlist as well as being more than happy to chat between songs, which some bands these days don’t tend to do.
