Live Review: Editors on tantalising form at Roadmender warm-up gig

Ahead of kicking off a summer of festival dates in the UK and across Europe, on Wednesday night Editors played an intimate warm up gig at the Roadmender.

For more than two decades, the acclaimed West Midlanders have packed venues across the world and last year released their seventh album EBM.

The sonic trajectory Editors have forged during their career is a fascinating one.

While their Mercury Prize nominated debut The Back Room was firmly rooted in gloomy indie post-punk, four years later they’d all but ditched guitars for electronics.

And, while interim albums saw a return to a more ‘traditional’ sound, EBM saw the band dive (nearly fully) into the genre the album shares its name with.

How well does this combine to make one cohesive 17-song set on a weeknight in Northampton? The answer’s complicated!

Opening proceedings was October Drift, last seen across town at The Black Prince in March last year.

This time however, they found themselves playing to hundreds more people already packed inside the Roadmender.

Slightly hamstrung by a stage at least 95% covered in equipment, October Drift did a cracking job tearing through a set of grunge injected rock, playing songs from 2022 LP I Don’t Belong Anywhere and their 2020 debut.

And, when not thrashing away at his guitar, singer Kiran Roy could be found standing on the barrier or among the crowd itself.

When Editors arrived onstage, they launched straight into EBM’s closing track Strange Intimacy.

With the venue pulsing with orange light, the electronic behemoth had a melodic enough chorus still big enough for frontman Tom Smith’s signature vocals to cut through.

The bulk of Editors’ set comprised of tracks from their latest album, its predecessor Violence and 2007’s An End Has A Start.

With the stage, now only 75% covered in equipment and smith’s piano front and centre, the rest of the band remain relatively routed to their corners all night.

However, Smith effortlessly shifted between a frontman clasping the microphone and its stand with both hands or pulling angular shapes and also either playing guitar and piano.

Both An End Has A Start and The Racing Rats are early cuts of classic anthemic guitar and piano-led Editors, however, it’s their newer material where they continue to shine, upping both the BPM and the electronic barrage.

Strawberry Lemonade, Kama Climb and Picturesque all do their upmost to shift the mood from a midweek indie gig vibe to a weekend early hours club night.

A cover of Adamski and Seal’s 1990 hit Killer brought Editors’ set to a close before a three-song encore began with early 2000s hit Munich.

Unsurprisingly, Editors end their set with Papillon – the band’s 2010 magnum opus – which saw the whole venue bouncing as its hook kicked in.

Editors probably find themselves in a bit of a quandary.

They are armed with some of the best alternative post-punk singles from the 2000s, yet tonight they only played one track from their debut album.

Watching Editors play tracks from EBM, you get the feeling they could comfortably ditch their guitars and drums, the bulk of their back catalogue, and transition into a fully-fledged band playing melodic electronica into the early hours.

Whether that’d successfully pull 800 people into a regional music venue on a school night, still expecting to hear some of their earlier music, who knows.

Either way, at the Roadmender Editors proved beyond doubt, anyone who’s seeing them on a festival stage this summer is in for a treat.

Editors played:

Strange Intimacy

An End Has a Start

Heart Attack

Bones

The Racing Rats

The Boxer

Strawberry Lemonade

Magazine

Karma Climb

Sugar

Hallelujah (So Low)

Violence

Picturesque

Killer (Seal cover)

Encore:

Munich

Ocean of Night

Papillon