Live review: Bring Me The Horizon, Rock im Park

“If you don’t jump,” Oli Sykes tells a town’s worth of people, “you’re a fucking dickhead.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Bring Me The Horizon’s current live carnival – an expanded version of last year’s NeX GEn arena extravaganza – is one of the biggest and most engaging spectacles you’ll see in modern rock. It should go without saying, also one of the best. Outdoors on Nürnberg’s enormous Zeppelin Field, they can add even more pyrotechnic firepower to the already bonkers production, as well as filling the skies with lasers, smoke, and more confetti than a royal wedding. It makes KISS look like a car boot sale. And yet, in the middle of it all, Oli remains… Oli.

“I need dancing. It can be the smallest, shittest dance ever,” he later says, requesting participation to LosT, before leading things in properly with the smooth charm of a greased-up Roger Moore: “Shake your dick!”

Last night at Rock im Park, Korn and Sleep Token both delivered a pair of individual masterclasses on what to do in the top spot of their respective stages. The latter leant heavily into cinematic production and otherworldly escapism, while the Bakersfield nu-metal legends flexed just how many bangers they’ve got and how hard they can drop them. But even among such weighty company, even following knockout sets from Weezer, Biffy and an insane showing from Knocked Loose, even with The Prodigy appearing at the same time across the site in a baffling clash, the Steel City sluggers are bigger, lairier, and packing more blockbusting moments than anyone else. Oh yeah, and even more bonkers carnage.

“I need real fucking German mosh-pits!” Oli demands before Teardrops, as though the chaos already kicking off isn’t enough. “What I’m seeing is pathetic!”

If you already caught this show, much will be familiar: the giant angel mosh-clap for Kool-Aid, the weird but funny Daryl Palumbo video for his part on AmEN!, Shadow Moses being set against a frozen, Game Of Thrones backdrop, with its ‘This is sempiternal’ break still one of the most exciting live moments in modern metal. But there’s new stuff, too, namely their take on Oasis’ Wonderwall, which is absolutely storming. And, actually, underlines BMTH’s ‘just go for the biggest thing you can think of’ approach, making it something wholly theirs.

It is, though, in the balance between sky-high production values and visceral, human connection that they continue to succeed. For every bit of CGI, PlayStation-looking NeX GEn narrative on the jumbotron, there’s a call for bigger, fiercer pits. For all the fire and choreographed effects, you realise there’s no other festival headliners demanding that, “I wanna see some blood.” Even when Oli goes full stadium rock, requesting people get on one another’s shoulders and hold up their phones, there’s an Alan Partridge tang: “I want a condensed Bon Jovi concert.”

Who, actually, is a peer of BMTH now. You might not hear the New Jersey cowboy calling for Germany to “Make me fucking proud” by giving him “a big, fat fucking circle-pit”, but this unvarnished banter among so much perfectly-executed grandiosity is part of what makes Horizon so brilliant at such a level as this. It keeps them human, the same lads they were 15 years ago. Just with more explosions.

It’s their confidence in both that makes them so spectacular tonight. They are a band completely at ease with the task of giving it to such an enormous, beans-on-toast audience as this, knowing they are the main event, a band with nothing to prove. But they approach the task like a tank firing at an ant anyway.

Like their fellow Sheffield rockers Def Leppard in the ’80s, Bring Me The Horizon have reached a point where there is no venue beyond them. Although they have brought much of the filth and fury – and gobby filth – of their roots with them to places like this. And they’re all the more untouchable for it.

Bring Me The Horizon will headline Reading & Leeds on August 22 – 24.

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