I bet I can make a One Direction-Beatles comparison that will stand up to the light of day. Both bands are filled with cheeky working class English Boys. The Beatles grim roots went over everybody in the States’ heads at the time, and Harvey Sykes Mummy selling her car on EBay was more a question of a Page Six gossip column than class distinction at the time, but it is there and if you are English it is unmistakable. Irish lad Niall Horan is as socially distant as possible from Chris Martin’s public school wanker.
Of all the things that made One Direction’s Tuesday’s tour stop at Izod Center a blast, this interplay of class and cleverness was the top of the pops. The screaming teen and preteen girls who filled the Arena might not have seen it but they noticed it. 1D are sweet as hell and a little cocky, sexually unthreatening but with a flirty edge (video of Harry having a bath nearly brought the roof down) but also fun, easy going, and their collective ego is subsumed in a sense of self-aware rootsiness. 1D are nice guys and they are cool guys.
5 Seconds Of Summer, an Australian boy band who play their own instruments and have three very good songs, “Heartbreak Girl”, “Over And Over” and “Teenage Dream” are a fine opening act: just different enough from the headliners, but just about good enough to hold the audience attention some of the time. In a piece of mismanagement that should get someone somewhere fired, none of their music is available in the States, so they might actually have missed their window of opportunity. But they are cute and personable and have cool accents so maybe they can overcome it.
1D hit the stage at 845pm and sang for two hours. 13 of 17 songs off Take Me Home, 5 songs off Up All Night and two covers. Given the heavy loading of the newbie you’d expect the set to implode a little, but it started with a sky high “Up All Night” and didn’t let up for a moment. Thank the fans who were uniformly wonderful: a screaming steamroller of positive vibes and girl power intensity who knew the words to every song but sang along mostly when requested.
The five boys are not specifically better than anybody else treading the same waters, though Harry might be cuter, and they might be interchangeable though Zayn Malik is the ringleader on stage, and Niall is the most musical, breaking into a guitar solo at one point, but they are definitely “It” boys, and they put on a real show. A 5 member harmony band trading off lead vocals on first tier professional pop product by Swedish team Savan Kotecha, Rami Yacoub and Carl Falk on their last album: yes this is a manufactured scene. But it is manufactured by pop music pros. The songs are uniformly good to great, the performances energetic and on a dime. And on stage they have a three piece band backing them that give them at least the impression of realness even though a lot of the sound comes from protools, if the vocals are being sweetened I can’t hear it.
There was no lull in the proceedings, no breather, the ballads and the fast songs were taken with the same high octane forward momentum. The songs were all power-pop: this isn’t dance at all and there are no back up dancers, the band themselves are wooden movers who have one basic choreography concept: that in 5 directions and all make your way to the front of the stage in one direction. The movement of the band is their weakest element though at least one reason for their success is that they aren’t a dance band: they aren’t an NSync or Backstreet Boys, they are very very white pop (despite the presence of Pakistani Zayn) with zero blues and r&b elements to their sound. They don’t dance because the beat would have em tripping over their feet.
Mid set they are lifted mid-air to a smaller stage where they read some twitter sent questions and then answer them to the girls in the audience. “Do you want to have pizza after the show?” Fun but flimsy.
They take us to the encore with one of their best songs “Kiss You” and I hit the road before the encores. The best songs work best on stage “Kiss You”, “One Thing”, “Heart Attack”. What I liked on stage I liked on record though there is a real consistent pleasure principle at work. The best singing of the night was left to a cover of a way, way, way over the top “Teenage Dirtbag”.
I know of the daughters of my friends who would have killed to have seen this show, and, indeed, quite as good as they were at Jingle Ball last December, they should have killed to see 1D. Watching a band at the height of their first round of popularity, in front of thousands and thousands of screaming fans, giving it all they have, is really a special feeling: It isn’t like nightclubs or superstar performances, or blues great: it is the thrill of youth, the thrill of the new. I guess a working class hero IS something to be, One Direction were terrific.
Grade: B+