Music review: The 1975, Glasgow Hydro

Just in aesthetic terms, The 1975's freshly unveiled show in support of their critically-exalted third album A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships was a banquet for the senses.

The 1975

The 1975, Glasgow Hydro ****

Lights, screens and floating geometric shapes glowed in a dynamically shifting kaleidoscope of sumptuous design and colour from somewhere over the horizon of pop stagecraft.

During jazzy R’n’B shuffle Sincerity is Scary, a New York street scene rolled past as frontman Matt Healy danced playfully on a conveyer belt. At the outset of The Ballad of Me and My Brain, he seemed to melt into the static hiss of the giant screen.

The Mancunian four-piece have substance to match the style.

For a long time much too posturing and pompous to take seriously, Healy and his bandmates have grown up and sobered up into one of the most adventurous, fluent and generationally-attuned British bands of their era, with their intelligent, heartfelt and luxuriously-crafted genre-nebulous songs for the smart phone age.

Where he would once have invariably performed shirtless to show off his tattoos in odd places, here Healy chucked himself gamely around the stage in an unflattering baggy blue boiler suit, having apparently learned some things from the David Byrne school of un-self-conscious nerdy cool. Body-popping black female backing dancers the Jaiy Twins were an inspired and joyful addition to the spectacle.

Referencing Trump, Kanye and the failure of modernity, The 1975’s best song Love It If We Made

It thundered to a thrilling climax, before solo acoustic ballad Be My Mistake shrunk the arena down to intimate proportions. First-album breakout tracks Chocolate and Sex were saved to the end as if as rewards to young fans who have obsessed over this band since day one. Their faith in The 1975 is starting to look visionary.- Malcolm Jack