The Emerge NME Radar Tour got up to full strength last night (September 29), as Wilder joined The Joy Formidable, Chapel Club and Flats on the road at the Norwich Waterfront.
The band had been missing due to prior committments as the dates got underway in Birmingham a day beforehand, but were on hand to kick off proceedings with a set including ‘TBT’ and recent single ‘Girls Vs Boys’.
The Bristol band are only playing three selected dates from the tour – Cardiff (October 8) and London (14) along with Norwich – as they schedule shows around their own headline dates.
East London‘s Flats followed them with a brief, torrid set of their battery acid punk to a visibly bemused crowd, during which frontman Dan Devine appealed to the audience to buy the band’s merchandise, before introducing “a song we wrote in our first rehearsal” and showering the front rows with beer.
Chapel Club singer Lewis Bowman, meanwhile, was making up for lost time as his band took to the stage, telling the audience that it had been his birthday the previous night, but that he’d forgotten to tell the crowd. He therefore requested that they show a suitable level of enthusiasm to make up for the missed celebrations, before launching into ‘All The Eastern Girls’.
Chapel Club played:
‘Fine Light’
‘O Maybe I’
‘Five Trees’
‘The Shore’
‘Surfacing’
‘All The Eastern Girls’
‘Paper Thin’
The night was brought to a close by headliners The Joy Formidable, who took to a stage decorated with soft lightbulbs inside bird cages.
Grabbing an acoustic guitar midway through the show, frontwoman Ritzy Bryan introduced ‘My Beerdrunk Soul Is Sadder Than A Thousand Dead Christmas Trees’ as the band’s “Christmas song”, before admitting that September “may be a bit early in the year for this sort of thing, but whatever!”
