Bring Me the Horizon, Royal Albert Hall, gig review: Classical meets stadium metal as Sheffield boys grow up gracefully

Former noisemakers are joined by orchestra in iconic venue to make for an atmospheric evening of epic contradictions

Commanding with Northern swagger: Bring Me the Horizon's Oli Sykes at the Royal Albert Hall (Getty)

For all their recent chart success, Bring Me the Horizon don’t feel like a band that should be playing the Royal Albert Hall. Gilded balconies and royal boxes couldn’t be any further from the North’s tiny sweat pits long-ago frequented by the former deathcore band who once penned such charmingly titled thrashy numbers as “Tell Slater Not to Wash His D***” and “No Need For Introductions, I've Read About Girls Like You On The Back Of Toilet Doors”.

Thankfully, the Sheffield five piece's recent output has been somewhat more subtle in its approach to heavy music, with each of their last three albums, culminating in last year’s That’s the Spirit, increasingly embracing melody and more intricate production. It’s no surprise then, that material from the band’s savage first two records (including the aforementioned tracks) was completely absent from last night's set at the Albert Hall, a special one-off show for the Teenage Cancer Trust featuring a full orchestra and choir.

After a looming strings intro, the band kicked off with That’s the Spirit’s opener “Doomed”, a plodding and bass heavy warm-up that sees frontman Oli Sykes drift in and out of falsetto. The choir did their best mock cheerleader chants over grumbling guitars in “Happy Song," while the heavily-tattooed Sykes invited a raucous mosh pit to “open it fookin’ up” in what was probably the Albert Hall’s first introduction to a “circle of death”.

While the big production of tracks from That’s the Spirit are obvious choices to give a classical reworking to, it’s heavier songs from BMTH’s previous two records Sempiternal and There Is a Hell Believe Me I’ve Seen It, There Is A Heaven Let’s Keep It a Secret that were given a fresh injection from the choir and orchestra. The live strings on “It Never Ends” added a richness to the blistering down-tuned intro while providing the perfect counterpoint to Sykes' guttural screams and chugging breakdown. "Shadow Moses" sounded epic, with the choir creating an almost Benedictine atmosphere without losing any of the song's heaviness.

“Empire” and “Go to Hell for Heaven’s Sake” were more run-of-the-mill shouty rock tracks, while expletive-laden “Antivist” seemed out of place in the venue, with its chorus of “middle fingers up if you don’t give a f***” prompting the young crowd to follow suit in a sea of bouncing bodies.

Sykes is a commanding frontman, spindly and shaggy-haired, but with a cocky northern swagger lacked by so many of the genre’s US offerings. The rest of the band are less mobile and it was easy to miss the brains of the outfit, multi-instrumentalist Jordan Fish – credited for driving BMTH’s more experimental direction – hiding at the back of the stage behind his keyboard.

Appropriately, the band finished on the almost Robyn-esque thudding electro of “Oh No”, a song that couldn’t be further from their brutal roots (it has a saxophone solo for God’s sake), illustrating what a bizarre journey it had been to end up here. Metal, hardcore, screamo – whatever you want to call it – gets a bad press, especially when it tries to grow up, but last night shows that when done right, there’s no reason why it can’t get a promotion from the kids’ table to sit with the adults.