“Those rainy days, they ain’t so bad when you’re the King,” Caleb Followill crooned to a sweaty, swaying crowd on the sands of Atlantis on Wednesday night. The lyric had been written about cloud-ridden England, but even in Dubai, the sentiment stands — whatever the weather, be it rain or shine or the UAE’s unforgiving humidity, when the Kings of Leon are on stage, nothing else matters.
For an hour-and-a-half, Nashville’s favourite brothers Caleb, Nathan, Jared Followill, and cousin Matthew, gave it their everything. Between Nathan’s relentless drumming on showdown track Four Kicks, Jared’s spellbinding bass line in On Call, Matthew’s ability to play guitar with his tongue during the supernatural tune Closer, and of course, Caleb’s palpable Southern warmth and heartbreakingly expressive vocals throughout, it was hard to catch your breath.
Some fans might be attached to the Kings of Leon of ten years ago with their adult-film-star moustaches and aloof-meets-aggressive rock star antics, but the boys have exercised their right to grow and move on. Gone are the days of smashing their guitars post-performance or jumping around like men possessed, to distract from the fact that they didn’t know their instruments.
The four have matured immeasurably, both as musicians and as people. They’re all married now, for one — three of them are fathers — and after a sobering hiatus brought on presumably by Caleb’s drinking and intra-band tensions in 2011, they’ve bounced back sounding more alive than ever.
The hour-and-a-half set they put on — their first in Dubai, second in the UAE — swung boldly between their six studio albums, starting with Supersoaker off the band’s latest effort, Mechanical Bull, and immediately delving back in time with the cheeky Taper Jean Girl from nearly a decade ago. The hits kept rolling in — the Rachel Bilson-inspired fight-track My Party, the nostalgic duo of Molly’s Chambers and The Bucket, the commercial scorcher Pyro and the desperately hopeful Immortals where Caleb urges the crowd: “don’t forget to love before you’re gone”.
The night was filled to the brim with emotion. Tonight had Nathan howling hauntingly in the background while Caleb’s voice broke with feeling in the foreground. Use Somebody united the crowd in impassioned sing-along and evoked both universal and personal meaning. Cold Desert was a particularly chilling stand-out, a song about desolate loneliness that Caleb recorded under the influence with no recollection of it the next day. Sung live, it took on a completely new lightness with the fresh-faced front man seeming far from hopeless.
After a quick dash off stage, the band returned with a final bout of charged tunes to end the night with a rush of adrenaline, and the unflinching grit of Crawl and Black Thumbnail led straight into a burst of pyro with Sex on Fire, the band’s most popular hit, which had every 21+ year old in the crowd emptying their lungs out as they yelled along.
The gig ended, and one minute later Nathan took to his Twitter with a little review of his own: “Thank you Dubai. Beautiful, sweaty, & boisterous.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
