Paramore, review, O2 Arena London: Band’s energy never falters

It’s rare to see both the audience and the band lift each other up so generously

“Missing the old Paramore,” one fan wrote on Hayley Williams’s Instagram page, three nights into the band’s 2018 European tour. It seemed to tap into the Paramore frontwoman’s most public anxiety. “Old Paramore is on YouTube. Whenever you want! But I still promise I will never ask you to be whoever you were 15 years ago,” she replied.

Seeing Paramore tonight at the London O2 Arena is not only an opportunity to observe how these musicians fare as a matured band, but how much, if at all, their fans have grown with them. It’s important to see some signs of growth on both counts. Williams once seemed to be the only woman in a scene rife with misogyny, which spawned the band’s first hit single “Misery Business” – and, as Williams admits to us tonight, is “probably the reason that we met most of you in this room”.

Tonight, the band and the crowd are operating on two different points of nostalgia. The male musicians onstage wear gauzy shirts, while Williams’s hair is white, wan and crimped – an obvious 1980s costume. In the crowd, there’s hardly an earlobe left unstretched, nor a fringe left unflopped. It’s a reflection of Paramore at their most cartoonish, back in their aggressively adolescent days.

Even if the band and the crowd aren’t sharing the same vision, every person in the arena tonight is thriving off their own Paramore-inspired energy. That, more than a hit song from 2007, is why thousands of people have come here to see them. Paramore are, above all, a paragon of resilience. For all of their divorces and depressions, the band’s energy never falters.

From Zac Farro’s enthusiastic drumming to Taylor York’s knee-shaking riffs and back again to Williams’s composed ferociousness, this is a band that is wholeheartedly in love with their music. There’s proof of that in every song, and there isn’t a single one the band doesn’t perform with the grit of Olympians.

Tonight, and possibly every night, the fans return this love in kind. No matter how devastating the subject matter of the songs and the musicians’ lives – faking happiness, reaching rock bottom, breaking hearts – they still command us to dance.

The crowd clap with the rising beats, light up the arena with their phones and sing along to every single word. It’s rare to see both the audience and the band lift each other up so generously, but this isn’t anything new for Paramore. It’s why those who are missing the “old Paramore” needn’t bother. Tonight, Paramore have given another crowd the experience of uncomplicated joy, just like they always have done, and always will.