For a band whose ascent from playing relatively small, club-size venues to a huge halls has been somewhat meteoric, Turnstile sure know how to engage a massive crowd. From the very beginning of their headline performance in the 10,000 capacity Great Hall at London’s Alexandra Palace, they had everyone singing along. The dreamy chant along title track from recent album Never Enough found everyone in full voice, regardless of the hike up the hill to reach the venue.
Nor had the audience tired physically, as we soon found out when the first riff dropped and the shockwave from the initial mosh of the night rippled all the way from the front of the crowd to the back. The jostling for position continued through the carnage of “T.L.C.”, where eager fans used the chaos in the crowd – instigated by the band’s energetic, inflammatory punk – to rat run through the spaces up to the sweaty mass at the front, navigating sub-pools of mini mosh pits along the way.
On top of being a kick-ass live performance musically, Turnstile have cleverly turned their show into an audio-visual offering that ensures the energy remains high throughout. A team of camerapeople weave their way through the sweaty masses, filming individuals as they dance and slam their way along with the thunderous performance. Meanwhile frequent cuts to an overhead shot showing the extent of the mass of writhing bodies to the back of the room adds to the awesome impact – it creates a feedback loop that makes everyone want to keep going, to go harder, to make this living melange even more frenzied.
It also gives Turnstile – and vocalist Brendan Yates in particular – significant power over the audience. When he told the audience to put their friends on their shoulders before “Real Thing”, the crowd basically became double decker, such was the rate of take up on his request. Over the razor-edged riffs of “Fazed Out” all he had to yelp was “Do it” and everyone seemed to know what he meant: jump around like hell. He of course was the most energetic of all, his circus prancing like madness reaching a peak in “Sunshower” with his insistences of “Rain!” being accompanied by such physical emphasis you thought the heavens might actually open.
Turnstile then took it back to the start with a trio of tracks from their 2013 EP Step 2 Rhythm, which simultaneously showed how raw they used to be but also how much of their current stadium-sized sound was already intact in their early years. “I never thought I’d play this one at Ally Pally,” Yates commented before the band launched into “Pushing Me Away” – it might have been written to be played in backrooms of bars, but it sounded imperious on this stage.
Throughout the 90 minute performance, Yates continually emphasised how the band “needed” the audience, urging them to sing louder and writhe harder. This meant the hall was consistently filled with football stadium-like chants along with Pat McRory and Meg Mills’ anthemic riffs and especially the extended repetition of the titular word in “Sole”.
The involvement of the crowd was so intense that many may have completely forgotten about the giant glitter ball that was suspended high above the stage through the set. This made its sudden appearance for “Seein’ Stars” (after a brief blackout for a playback of “Ceiling”) all the more dazzling and dreamy. This respite from the harder edges of Turnstile’s music was short-lived though, with “Holiday” soon battering its way through the audience with ease.
From that point, the whole audience seemed to be cruising on an imperceptible wave of audio magic as Turnstile finished the night with a succession of their most emphatic tracks off their world-beating recent records. “Look Out For Me” kicked off this effervescent run which culminated in a sickeningly brilliant one-two punch of “Blackout” and “Birds”.
When the final note had been played, the crowd surged in two directions – either to the front to try and grab any sort of memorabilia being thrown into the crowd (setlists, drum skins, plectrums) or out the door to try and beat the rush back down the hill. Whichever way they went, everyone was conjoined as another link in the Turnstile Love Connection.
