If, for a change, you see pop as a way to escape from everything that is frowned upon or even forbidden in society, then the stage design in Berlin’s Columbiahalle deserves an A with an asterisk. While you hardly see real, promising fluorescent tube advertising anywhere anymore, energy-saving LEDs help you at the concert Glass Animals at least an aesthetic comeback on Monday evening. And in this as in other respects, all the lamps go on immediately.
Outside, autumn is looming and children are fleeing the bitterly cold pool water. Outside, the summer is gradually quitting its service, and outside the Federal Minister of Economics has also reset the advertising lighting, by decree, from A like Ahhhhhh! on Z as in pitch black.
Inside, on the other hand, the world is just fine, still or again, it almost doesn’t matter. This is because everyone has waited long enough for this concert (pandemic) and the band leader Dave Bayley has apparently been secretly exchanged for a bouncy ball that looks and sings exactly like Dave Bayley. Nobody here will claim that this Bayley can walk on water. But he can do it a bit. The stage set, this neon-panelled light festival, finally looks like a pool, and Bayley, light-footed as a water strider, is now in the middle and on top of it, on the water surface – and at the pool edge the audience of about 3500 grinning faces glows, which is now one for 80 minutes maybe has the last blast of fun this summer.
There has never been a slower rise to number one
In other respects, one is also dealing with a phenomenon that still amazes the layperson and pleasantly surprises the expert. The Glass Animals, founded in Oxford ten years ago, took an almost anachronistically long time to cross certain thresholds of perception. But then, by indie standards, things really got going, especially with the summer hitware “Heat Waves”, which made a big splash on Tiktok and has so far reached almost two billion hits on Spotify alone. In the USA, the track, which was first released in 2020, now holds the record for the song that took the longest time to reach number one on the Billboard charts.
This “Heat Waves” is about losing someone, regretting it or at least still being very sad about it, but without blaming the loss on someone else than yourself. “Sometimes, all I think about is you”, this is how the whole heartbreak goes, which became a viral hashtag, and if you were to do a poll in the Columbiahalle, well, what does it mean . at the point, then an estimated two-thirds majority would sob: actually always.
Heartbreak and a lot of fun, that sounds like a conflict, which should also be casually resolved here with a reference to what is always the solution when nothing else works – music. A reference to the beats from the “Big Berta” category and the elaborate artworks, which are sometimes Dalí, sometimes more Dall-E, but always from the Photocandyshop – how at this concert you finally feel that all-solving feeling again to be in absolutely professional hands.
And then? Then you walk out the door and miss again.