Gig review: McFly

Published on Monday 25 October 2010 19:43

MCFLY EDINBURGH PLAYHOUSE ***

MCFLY are back and they're all grown up. Their forthcoming, two-years-in-the-making fifth album Above the Noise might have dispensed with the sugar rush teen pop anthems which made their name in favour of a measured swing towards adult-orientated rock, but the quartet are playing to the same gallery as ever. Those in the almost exclusively female crowd as old as the band's average age, 24, were elder campaigners here.

Otherwise a packed teenage audience screamed along to Tom's affirmation that "being in McFly is the best job in the world", to drummer Harry's rather rambling goodbye, and to the newly buff Dougie and Danny's thick, tattooed arms, like they were a pair of gymnasts for whom puberty has been artificially delayed. Amid fan favourites like All About You and the acoustic heartthrobbery of Too Close For Comfort, the new material actually succeeded very well in being instantly adored by the McFly hardcore while drawing a line in the sand between then and now.

Older fans might have been amused by the way End of the World riffed liberally on Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, I'll Be Your Man merged falsetto Prince vocals with the opening guitar motif of Band On the Run, and doses of guitar-twiddling, Bryan Adams-like respectability were spread liberally around. As the Take That anthemics of Shine a Light died down, though, the kids just screamed and screamed for more.