By Jase Walker
This is a show where I genuinely thought I shouldn’t travel all the way to Tilburg from Amsterdam on a weekday night but I’ve been wanting to see The Night Flight Orchestra live for bloody years now. Considering how rarely they seem to do actual show tours, I couldn’t risk missing them. So here I am on a Thursday night, at the other end of the Netherlands in 013 once again for some poppy rock and roll. Along for this particular stop is Bee Gees metal cover act, Tragedy, who are also selling a T-shirt in the merch section with “I sweat glitter and cum confetti” on the front of it, love it.
After getting to the venue I rechecked the show timings and I’m actually pretty surprised that this is on the ‘Next’ stage and not the main hall as I was under the impression that TNFO were quite a fair bit bigger than that but I’m not one to bemoan a more intimate show.
Tragedy begins their show with someone walking on stage with a klaxon on their head with a siren wailing which is definitely a first for me on band introductions! Oh wait, it gets even better, playing the introduction to Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown’ (extremely badly)on a recorder before launching into their namesake song, ‘Tragedy’. I may be mistaken but is one of their member’s job to literally just mess around on stage? It certainly seems so while he’s running around mockingly playing a Flying-V ukulele.
ABBA’s ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’ has its verses put against the riffs of Iron Maiden’s ‘The Trooper’. This is so incredibly goofy and I love it! Also including said stage mischief maker dabbing the sweat off the other members with a towel, not forgetting to do the microphones either. “If you want to reach your full potential as a man, you gotta drink your own sperm” is a sentence I never thought I’d hear at a show but here we are.
Now we have blow up sex dolls on stage while they sing ‘Summer Days’ of Grease fame dancing around to the music, very bizarre. I also wasn’t really expecting ‘Sweet Caroline’ in the set but the Dutch are seemingly less enthusiastic about singing along to it. To their credit they do a fantastic job of harmonized vocals in their cover of ABBA’s ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’.
It’s been quite a silly set but this is a band that despite being quite unserious and goofy are genuinely very funny to watch and super entertaining. ‘It’s Raining Men’ to the opening riff of Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’ was a quick switch up that seemed to wake up the audience a bit finally! Also quite possibly the longest band introduction while also hanging on a song resolution ever. Absolutely ridiculous but properly hilarious.
Twinkling LED lights decorate the stage and an airport style boarding call rings out over the PA signalling the start of the show, I’ve waited years for this! The backing singers in scantily clad air hostess outfits join the others on stage followed by TFNO‘s main singer in a fantastically flamboyant outfit to match.
It sounds bloody fantastic right from the start and the dancey piano is punching through just as I’d hoped: ground control we are ready to depart on a fantastical musical journey. The vocal work is absolutely outstanding, this music really scratches that outrageous pop itch while keeping the glam rock vibe going. While I know it’s a new album tour (which drops tomorrow as of writing this review), I’m really hoping for a real healthy chunk of ‘Aeromantic’ songs in the mix. I’ve just noticed the backing singers are drinking water from champagne glasses too which is a really nice little touch of class. Actually looking a bit closer it might be champagne anyway.
‘Domino’ amps up the funky side of things with a real sexy baseline and bongos, the crowd is seemingly starting to loosen up and has finally found their dancing shoes. Everything about TNFO sounds brilliant, it’s saturated in every way, the low end from the bass and drums is felt in every pulse, the guitars and piano pads the rest out and the vocals punch right through. The harmonizing from the backing vocals is truly phenomenal though, they sound great on record but they outdo that massively on their live performance. It’s also quite funny that they’re quite aware of the fact that they’ve drawn up a setlist that people won’t really know as it’s a huge chunk of the album that releases the next day but people are rolling with it and seemingly enjoying the live debut of them anyway. At one point their keys player does a sort of self-duelling solo between his synthesiser and piano for a quick break, the clash of sounds is great to listen to.
TNFO ooze style in all possible ways from the music just being plain fun to dance and sing along to all the way to their sharp outfits and smart aesthetic. This is a band that is very much ‘what you see is what you get’, they look and sound amazing up on the stage and clearly have a great time performing their material and fully enjoy leaning into the image they’ve built around their album and single art too. I definitely feel that there’s greater heights for them in terms of the production they roll with, not that this was disappointing by any stretch. I strongly believe that with time, TNFO will follow-up on their machinations and reach ever greater heights of their live performance and ‘take to the skies’ as it were.
Sadly I didn’t quite get the sort of ‘Aeromantic’ songs I was hoping for but that’s my own fault for not getting my arse along to a show on the tours they did in support of it. This show has been a great exploration of a lot of their catalogue old and new and while I didn’t get to sing along as much as I wanted to, I thought the show was definitely worth the wait.
They definitely deserve a bigger stage though, they’ve got the right energy for demolishing the main room at 013. Time to get home and I’ll be back here again tomorrow evening for something very different.
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