Queens of the Stone Age review: Homme's heroes work up a thirst for power rock

Homme run: frontman Josh Homme ignited the evening with Feet Don’t Fail Me
Burak Cingi/Redferns

After a molten day in the capital, Saturday’s Queens of the Stone Age gig in Finsbury Park offered the unlikely opportunity to watch some desert rock in a corner of London that was, temporarily at least, doing a passable impression of an actual desert.

To be clear, this wasn’t always a good thing. A staffing problem within Workers Beer Company — the firm running the bars for concert operator Festival Republic — meant that, in the arid, 49,000-capacity dustbowl, dry-mouthed fans were forced to wait an hour or more for drinks. An apology has since been issued but Twitter is still ablaze with complaints about bar queues (not to mention a lack of toilets, areas of poor sound and opportunistically priced £3 bottles of water) and voicing your perplexed irritation quickly became a useful icebreaker in the crowd.

But if the offstage action seemed almost comically hapless, pretty much everything on stage was anything but. Ostensibly, the UK stop-off of QOTSA’s Villains Tour, this all-dayer was bolstered by a line-up thick with uncommonly special warm-up acts. Scream-along punk duo Deap Vally and political rap supergroup Run The Jewels ripped through invigorating, full-blooded mid-afternoon sets. However, it was the shirtless, writhing form of Iggy Pop — who ended with a growling, joyous cover of his late friend David Bowie’s track, The Jean Genie — that truly whet the whistle for the main event.

Frontman Josh Homme — who rightly lost plenty of admirers last year when, unforgivably, he kicked a female photographer in the face at a US gig — led his band on to a stage thronged by wobbling, multicoloured striplights and launched straight into the glammy Do It Again. It was an early hit (paired instantly with the knock-kneed groove of The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret) but there was new alongside the old. Villains, their Mark Ronson-produced seventh record, became the California band’s first UK No 1 last August and the quality of that recent material shone through. Feet Don’t Fail Me — which builds from a brooding, occult intro into a kicky, venomous stomp — ignited the evening and already sounds like a classic with many more miles on the clock.

Recently Homme’s band have perhaps been known for unexpected, pop-leaning collaborations with Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears, Elton John and, yes, Ronson. But they are, in essence, a forebodingly heavy rock outfit. And they reminded everyone of this with a pulverising encore rendition of A Song for the Deaf. Giant, swirling circle pits opened up in the crowd and any grumbles about the day’s beer drought were briefly lost amid the exhilarating, cup-chucking mayhem.

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