Music review: Blink-182
Hydro, Glasgow **
On this evidence, however, that’s one easily pleased generation. They played a particularly one-note show, although to be fair the unchanging pace of it all was at least furiously lively and energetic. A handful of their hits were played early, including The Rock Show, What’s My Age Again? and This Feeling, and much of the rest of the set came from last year’s first post-DeLonge record California. It was this album which provided one of the best and most mature moments of the show, in fact, as the unpleasantly seedy Dysentery Gary was followed up by the expansive, affecting Los Angeles.
Yet there was little sense of drama and epic scale to match the venue elsewhere, aside from Travis Barker’s fierce, pyro-abetted drum soloing and a slick moment where Mark Hoppus invited a young fan onstage to play his bass during Always. All the Small Things was a predictable spike in the show just before it ended, but for a long time it seemed to run mainly on a reconstituted teen nostalgia for two decades past.
DAVID POLLOCK