It was raining. We were ready. And The Streets were going to play. But when we finally fought our way through the human sea from the Magic Box towards the main stage, it dawned on us that everyone else was going away. We stepped out into the square — and stood almost alone. It felt like showing up to a housewarming, where the host has forgotten to invite the guests but is still bestowing drinks and firing up under the facility.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
It began with a promise: “Who's got the bag? Don't mug yourselves.” Mike Skinner stood in flabby sneaks and a crumpled polo with his own logo -- and looked as if he'd stood up in a tent that smelled of weed and bacon chips. But then the music began.
'Turn the Page', 'Let's Push Things Forward', 'Don't Mug Yourself'. It all flowed like lager beer in a hot plastic beaker. Skinner chatted between numbers, laughed, flicked with British pub humour and invited us into his musical outdoor temple. A sort of communal, pagan sunshine prayer in which he insisted several times that if we just tried, God would let the sun break through the clouds.
He drank the crowd's bayers. He crawled up on shoulders. He spoke of Green Day with a passive-aggressive warmth that you didn't quite know was beef or just an odd bromance. And so it happened: after twenty minutes of warm-up, some click struck his head. He went in full Skinner mode. A show that was already good turned brilliant.
He played among the crowd. And the audience loved him for it. There were moshpits, there was sweat, there was “Fit But You Know It,” “Blinded by the Lights,” “Dry Your Eyes.” Everything was delivered with full band -- Wayne Bennett on guitar, Cassell the Beatmaker on drums, Kevin Mark Trail as sublime backing vocals, and a guitarist who might not have been Rob Harvey -- an uncompromising energy, as if it were Brixton, not Odense. They were with him all the way, playing as if they had been at war together.
The stage lighting was simple but impactful. The jeering followed Skinner as he crawled across barriers and clung to shoulders as the rain trickling down lay like a veil across the square. A guy with a headlamp filmed everything from his buddy's shoulders. A girl in yellow raincoat screamed the words to “Dry Your Eyes” as if she had written them herself. It wasn't just a concert — it was something you became a part of.
And so. In the end. 'Take Me as I Am'. It all culminated in one long, wet climax. Huge moshpits opened up, Skinner stood on stage, drenched in beer, barefoot, without stockings. Like a drowned prophet with an audience around him who had had one of those experiences that you try to explain for weeks, but which never sounds as magical as it felt.
Let's just put it like this...
Mike Skinner couldn't give a damn for how many people had turned up. But he gave everything. And that made us who stayed the luckiest in the world.
The energy as he flung 'Let's Push Things Forward' and shouted “Who's got the bag? Who's got the bag?” , was electric. The rain, the crowd -- everything was crushed in an instant. The whole concert was presence.
Skinner and his crew kept the momentum until the final note. When they finished with 'Take Me as I Am', the main stage exploded -- and we could scream well through: there are 48,000 people who missed this bang. Worth sixes -- without blinking.
