Elbow – Arena, Manchester 09/04/14

There’s a north Manchester suburb called Prestwich; it’s probably best known for being The Fall’s de facto hometown, given that Mark E. Smith has spent most of his life there. He lives there now, by all accounts, and there’s certainly more than enough drinking holes up and down Bury New Road that are sufficiently rum, for want of a more expressive term, to attract such a bona fide eccentric.

Prestwich is also where I went to high school. In late 2007, a few months before I left for college, we had some representatives in from local sixth forms. When the chap from Bury College spoke, he mentioned, in incredibly sheepish fashion, that members of Elbow had studied there. The deafening silence suggested that the vast majority of my peers weren’t familiar with the band. Tonight, the 16,000 capacity local arena is packed to the proverbial rafters. I doubt that guy’s quite so meek these days.

The cynical side of me feels like Elbow are more a British institution than a Mancunian one, even if they continue to exist on the fringes of the mainstream; after tonight, I realise that they probably tick both boxes. Like most of this evening’s crowd, I was a late adopter; I didn’t see the band live until the summer of 2012, when they played at the Jodrell Bank space observatory near Macclesfield. The novelty of travelling to see live music in such surroundings was wonderful; if you grew up anywhere near Manchester, you’ll have been there on a school trip at some point. It rained with an unerring consistency, but I didn’t mind; the band recognised the venue’s significance, and raised their game accordingly. They were superb that night.

A few months later, they toured the UK’s arenas. I was surprised; their last record was already almost two years old, and the B-sides collection they’d just put out, Dead in the Boot, hardly carried the kind of mainstream appeal you’d deem necessary for such an ambitious jaunt. They sold it out, of course, but the night they played Manchester – a Saturday evening in December, as I recall – they phoned it in. I expected far more acknowledgement of their return to home turf; the studio at which they made the bulk of their last three records is just over the road, but instead, they turned in pretty much the same, tired set that I imagine they had at every other soulless aircraft hangar they’d been booked for. They were going through the motions.

The fact that The Take Off and Landing of Everything is largely excellent suggests that they made the most of taking some real time away. They open with “Charge”; it’s a new track that they debuted last time out, but carries so much more bite this time around, with Garvey articulating his fear of becoming a belligerent old drunk in typically stirring fashion. There’s a clear confidence in the new material being displayed early on, with mixed results; “Real Life” drags on at an almost agonising pace, whilst “New York Morning” is Garvey at his most cartoonish, a deliberately ‘life-affirming‘ ode to a city “where folk are nice to Yoko.” He claims that New York reminds him of Manchester; on this evidence, it’s a comparison that does both towns a disservice.

“Fly Boy Blue/Lunette” is a far more welcome inclusion; in fact, it’s one of the best songs the band have ever written. The boisterous first half, with its effect-laden vocals and brash instrumentation, flirts with the sound that characterised Asleep in the Back, whilst the latter segment is a genuinely gorgeous take on ageing; “random abandon, or ballast for joy?” is, for my money, as irresistibly poetic a spin on drinking as Bukowski ever managed. As keen as he might seem to paint himself otherwise, Garvey is a real master of this kind of verse; his everyman approach carries him perilously close to cheesiness every now and again, but he’s almost untouchable when he’s really on form.

Older cuts are almost entirely off of this evening’s menu; the closest we get is “Great Expectations”, a beautiful fictionalisation of a wedding “set on the 135 bus from Bury to Manchester”. Garvey plays it, along with the incongruously political “The Blanket of Night”, on the ‘B-stage’; “this is different from most bands’ vanity thrusts, because ours goes down into the crowd, securing our position as band of the people.” I suspect he might know full well how the critics view him.

Musically speaking, Elbow have everything down pat on stage; the inner-city ardour of “Mirrorball” is presented with the necessary strings, whilst Mark Potter’s guitar positively rips its way through “Grounds for Divorce”. The main set closes on another romantically-presented paean to boozing – a shrink would likely have a field day with that particular trend in my attraction to Elbow songs – and the brass backing on “My Sad Captains” is pitched perfectly.

The encore’s an obvious one; there’s “Starlings”, a love song that less toes the line between earnest and corny than it does dance across it. The wistful refrain on “Lippy Kids”, meanwhile – “build a rocket, boys!” – is punctuated by the fellow in front of me, who looks slightly the worse for presumably having spent the afternoon displaying a dedication to Garvey’s fondness for a good pub, telling me that “he makes it sound so easy. Try finding the parts for a rocket in B&Q”. Last up, of course, is “One Day Like This”, and you get the impression that the band’s five members are the only people in Britain who aren’t sick to death of it. You have to give them a little bit of credit; it must be quite the rush, after spending years in relative obscurity, to see thousands of people belt back such a huge chorus at you on a nightly basis.

The fact of the matter is this; Elbow deliver a live show that affords fair representation to the subtlety of their compositions, whilst still acknowledging that Garvey, as Britain’s unofficial poet laureate, is the real star of the show. On a personal level, it’s just a relief that there’s a Manchester band that are genuinely representative of the city I know and love. There’s none of Oasis’ hideous bravado, or any of the blindingly painful nostalgia so readily applied to the Hacienda’s regulars.

There’s an honesty, too, that’s miles away from Morrissey’s weird appetite for soap opera-level amateur dramatics. When The Stone Roses reformed at Heaton Park, the place was teeming, first and foremost, with Glaswegians, more so than locals. Bands like that don’t speak for Manchester. Swagger and arrogance never has. Guy Garvey presents a far truer account of the city in 2014, and I’m glad that he’s ours. Elbow were together for six years before they even managed to get a record out; they were a decade down the line when The Seldom Seen Kid brought them they attention they deserved. The adoration from an enormous hometown crowd tonight is unadulterated, and feels like vindication; where Elbow’s story is concerned, the good guys won in the end.