Kings of Leon, London live review — subtle rock band comfortable in their own skin

There are vexingly few ways for a rock and roll band to grow old gracefully. Kings of Leon, the maverick, long-standing Nashville group formed of three brothers and a cousin from the musical Followill clan, appear to be making a fine fist of it.

When the familial quartet first emerged, with the appositely titled 2003 album Youth & Young Manhood, they sounded like the essence of masculine early-life energy. A riot of frantic yet forensic riffing and country-hued Southern boogie, it led to them being hailed, along with the Strokes and White Stripes, as a rebirth of kick-ass, all-American rock and roll.

How things change. This engrossing headline set at London’s annual BST Hyde Park festival demonstrated that age has not withered Kings of Leon, but it has greatly altered them. In the band’s middle years, they have developed a reflectiveness and a strain of rumination that greatly becomes them.

The first immediate differences are visual. No longer the hirsute caveman rockers of 20 years ago, three-quarters of the family are now resolutely clean-cut. Frontman Caleb Followill sports a trim short back and sides; natural diffidence and low-key demeanour do not detract from his compelling charisma.

Kings of Leon began as a garage rock band, but have long since progressed to filling the wide-open spaces of arenas, stadiums and festivals. This does not mean they have developed grand gestures. In stark contrast to the weekend’s PT Barnum-like antics of Coldplay at Glastonbury, the only crowd-pleasing trick here was the music.

This was plangent, poetic and glancingly profound. The supple songs from their recent UK number-two album, Can We Please Have Fun, hummed and thrummed like a nagging inner dialogue never likely to reach resolution. Words were oblique, and troubled: “I’m a man on a mission of going insane,” rued Caleb, on the thrusting “Nothing to Do”.

Among this introspection, the anthemic raucousness of their 2008 signature tune, “Sex on Fire”, felt oddly incongruous. More typical of their current mode was the new album’s spectral, insistent “Don’t Stop the Bleeding”, an adroit musing on love and loss with Caleb keening, “Everything will never change/I’m awake, just barely breathing.”

But Kings of Leon haven’t forgotten how to rock. Throughout, they played with the movement and understanding of siblings who’ve been jamming together for 25 years. They gelled superbly on the rollicking recent single “Mustang”, Caleb’s howled fervour not diminished by lyrics so gnomic, they verge on nonsensical: “Are you a Mustang or a kitty?”

Yet where they were once incendiary, now they are a deep, slow burn. Their signature note is perplexity at a world seemingly going to hell in a handbasket. “We all don’t know what to make of this mess,” Caleb sang regretfully on the pulsing “Nowhere to Run”. On “Split Screen”, he sighed wryly at the passing of time: “Is this a middle-of-a-life thought?”

It may sound dour, but it really wasn’t. Kings of Leon are a subtle, nuanced rock band who have grown into their own skin. For all their understatement, this was hugely uplifting.

★★★★☆

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