The Amazons live review: crowd-pleasing stadium rock makes for a night of fun

As blue-toned light fills the 1500-capacity main room of Birmingham’s O2 Institute, there is an air of excitement and anticipation. The stage layout is simple: a white sheet covers the back of the stage, and two rectangles hang from the ceiling. Anyone who has listened to The Amazons new album How Will I Know If Heaven Will Find Me? will recognise this as a reference to the house on the album’s cover. And as blood-red spotlights turn on and shine onto the stage, the band emerge. The opening riff and powerful drum intro to ‘How Will I Know’ start playing. The crowd, anticipating the show about to begin, erupts into a cacophony of cheers. 

Hailing from Reading, the four-piece band have mastered modern rock. It’s not an original sound by any means but it makes for crowd-pleasing live performances. What’s more, most, if not all, of The Amazons’ songs, have crowd interaction built into them, which have been written with festival or arena crowds in mind. This means that even if you weren’t familiar with the song before them starting, you were singing along to the chorus by the end. Countless ‘whoahs’, ‘ohs’, and ‘ahs’ follow the songs’ choruses. By the end of every song, they had every single member of the crowd singing along with them. It is this that makes The Amazons fun to see for both their most loyal fans (including someone in the audience who had apparently seen them 60 times) and their newer ones. Inexplicably, this also included the crowd shouting “sexy ginger bastard” at lead singer Matt Thompson, something which continued throughout the entire show. 

At this point, the crowd is a uniform mass bouncing up and down

Halfway through the set, the band take time to introduce themselves and note how beautiful Birmingham was – something that evoked a roaring cheer drenched with irony. It is then that Birmingham native Harry Koisser, the band Peace’s frontman, walks out onto the stage. After explaining that he had helped The Amazons make How Will I Know, both he and The Amazons break out into an acoustic rendition of Peace’s song ‘Lovesick’. The crowd clap and sing along, reacting just as well as they did to The Amazons’ songs. 

Although The Amazons’ songs from their newest album were received well live, it is not until the second half of the set, where the band play their older hits, that the room explodes into whoops and cheers. The band, now reaching the end of their set, play classics like ‘Junk Food Forever’, ‘Mother’, and ‘Stay With Me’, which go down a treat. By the encore, no one in the venue is silent. As they finish playing ‘Bloodrush’, the lead single off How Will I Know, people know exactly what comes next: their biggest song, ‘Black Magic’. At this point, the crowd is a uniform mass bouncing up and down to the beat and with people of all ages singing along to both its iconic riff and chorus. 

In their current form, The Amazons simply lack the ‘wow factor’

With the band’s sound consisting of shiny polished guitars, reverberating drum beats and Thompson’s powerful vocals, The Amazons encapsulate the sound of modern rock. After hearing the strength of Thompson’s voice live and the power that the band’s three guitars bring, it is easy to imagine The Amazons stepping up to the role of playing crowds of tens of thousands of people instead of Birmingham’s O2 Insititute. But in their current form, The Amazons simply lack the ‘wow factor’ that would enable them to play such venues. Because while formulaic rock songs might get the audience participation going, there is only so far these can get you. With the market being so saturated, The Amazons have carved out a space for themselves, but fall short of the mark in terms of standing out. But for a night of fun, adrenaline, and some good old rock music, The Amazons fill that role perfectly.