Killing Heidi @ The Metro Theatre, Sydney NSW Australia written by Brendan Lewis
Fans have awaited the return of Killing Heidi for 20 years, and the crowd anxiously awaits with high excitement for this momentous show, and although most of the audience have grown up andmatured, the energy in our hearts clearly hadn’t! After two decades, have the band lost their touch or has their music simply matured and grown over that time?
Neither, you could tell from the get go that this was a Killing Heidi show like old times, with the show starting with an anticipating energy building instrumental intro with guitars, bass and drums, and then BAM! A springy, full of life Ella Hooper, bursts onto the stage leading into ‘Calm Down’ a perfect opener song to get us all ramped up straight away!
The energy crept up even more with my personal favourite and hard hitting Spider Man anthem, ‘I Am’ up second! Ella still moving around the stage like a kid in Toys R Us who just had the best happy meal ever, beckoning the crowd to sing along to the powerhouse chorus’s and giving me such a nostalgic energy rush like never before, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one!
After the energy hype of the first two songs, Jesse Hooper was first to formally welcome, and thank the audience, then shortly after leading into the next nostalgic track ‘Outside Of Me’, giving the crowd a different energy, heart throbbing, scream at the top of your lungs, energy, but a step down with the beat, which in that, gave just the right contrast from the first two power-house tracks.
Next, Ella greeted the crowd (formally) with the same bubbly excitement that was sustained through the previous three songs, and took the audience through some of their starting songs from the beginning of their career, including three beautiful acoustic renditions of ‘Kettle’ ‘Astral Boy’ and ‘Black Sheep’. With each track throughout, came a story, giving us a glimpse into the musical life from the beginning of the Hooper siblings.
After the doco-like musical journey, the energy started to creep up again musically, just when we could take it again after cooling down for the previous few songs, with Ella creeping up her high energy stage performance again for the home stretch, the tracks everyone knows and loves.
Ella and Jesse do their ‘final” talk to the audience (like we didn’t see an encore coming… blind pun alert) before leading into ‘Mascara’ and ‘Weir’, which made the crowds energy and cheers explode beyond previously witnessed! The audience up until now was very polite, and merely dating in their own designated bubble of space, but when the band hit us with these two classics, the energy in the crowd and on stage was lifted to a euphoric fever pitch, with no separation between the two songs, so no gap in the energy.
After the band left the stage for a breather before the “surprise” encore, I thought to myself, what a wonderful show, and how well the band have done with this set, curating the performance and sound to go with it, and making the set flow perfectly like a blockbuster movie, capturing our attention right from the start, holding it throughout the thick of it while they told the story, and brought us to the suspenseful epic climax at the end!
The encore saw the band dish out the final two crowd favourites, ‘Leave Me Alone’ and energetic, in your face, pop rock hit ‘Superman/Supergirl’ with its whip-lash effect from verses to chorus’s to finish off the gourmet pop rock meal the show has been!
I think I can speak for the masses, when I say that the band left the stage leaving the audience with the best buzz from their performance, and a heart full of beloved, memorable hits that outspend time itself, and proving that the band may have matured over the years, but they’re still very much young at heart and not slowing down!
I would definitely advise seeing these Aussie pop-rock pioneers if you can, and I really hope they continue creating music and performing, and I look forward to seeing them again!