Reviews

With a mish-mash of hair cuts, clothes and demeanours, one couldn’t have picked an unlikelier bunch from outside the (sold out) Night and Day before this gig.

To the audience, this doesn’t matter, but in today’s celeb and style obsessed times, this can be the only reason Stars seem starved of pop column inches, because they are one of the great, yes, great pop bands in existence.

Stars’ tales of star-crossed lovers in a world dominated by famine, floods and war are set against big gorgeous melodies and the sort of dynamics that wouldn’t go amiss inside a stadium.

That they’ve got the most compelling front duo since Agnetha and Frida in Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan doesn’t harm them either. Their sweaty intensity, theatricality and vein-popping passion carry Stars to heights you’d be hard pressed to believe.

Songs like In Our Bedroom after the War, Set Yourself on Fire, Elevator Love Letter and One More Night are all superb mini-musicals that left all my gig-mates with tears on our cheeks and smiles on our faces.

In a perfect world there wouldn’t be a need for corporate sponsored pop music as a soundtrack to corporate sponsored wars, but there would be Stars, shining bright and still creating the sparkliest pop music this side of the Milky Way. They are that good.