The excitement before a concert is always the best feeling, from the adrenaline to the eagerness to see your favourite artist singing your favourite songs.
After hours of travelling for Rex Orange County’s new album tour for “Pony”, you get to the venue (which in this case was the O2 Academy in Brixton) with plenty of time and queue when the doors open at 7pm to get to your seat nice and early and wait for the support act to come on at 7:30pm.
8pm, still nothing.
8:30pm, people are now cheering the technician.
9pm, the lights finally go off and Rex Orange County comes out and at this point, the boredom from sitting in a freezing cold hall for two hours is finally shifting as the crowd starts to re-energise when he comes on the stage.
Aside from the poor schedule and no explanation behind it, Rex Orange County came out with such a brilliant energy and really got the crowd going again. He had amazing stage presence from playing his instruments, to talking to the crowd and of course, he has an excellent voice. He played everything from everyone’s favourites, to his older less known music and his brand new album (of course).
The stage props were very fun and exciting and just added a little extra to his whole performance, they were eye-catching . He very cleverly made sure that the stage presence suited the songs that he was singing, for the slower songs it was just him on stage with a keyboard, a microphone and a plain white background so that you could solely focus on the songs and the lyrics. For the final part of the show it was show-stopping; bright flashing lights (all different colours), disco balls and a giant silver pony! It was astounding the amount of effort that was put into making the whole show such a fantastic experience for everyone there.
After his ‘final’ song he said a very teary goodbye which left the whole room shaken and feeling very emotional themselves with the genuine gratitude he had for his fans. Once he left the stage it didn’t take long for everyone to start cheering and chanting “we want more” and “one more song” encouraging him to come back out and wow us one more time. He came back on, still wiping the tears off his face before giving us his all and smashing out one more song before he had to actually leave.
Although there was a two hour a delay, his rather short performance was extremely jam packed and very well delivered, meaning he definitely didn’t disappoint and nobody will be forgetting that performance for a long time.