Photo: Kylie Keene

Arriving late to the Convention Centre, it’s with a heightened sense of anticipation that we take our seats  (yes, seat) for the triumphant return of Phoenix. When last here, they blitzed V Festival – albeit a blitzing that took place at the rather un-rock&roll hour of 3pm.

With echoes of Lisztomania ringing through the hall, one thing becomes immediately apparent: Phoenix can do the unthinkable, and get one of Brisbane’s larger venues to almost capacity – on a Monday night. Unheard of. Also, it’s the first show in a long time where we’ve seen teenage girls screaming, squealing, and getting all giddy on the front barricade. This is for frontman Thomas Mars, who is at least a decade older than anyone in the front row, as he leaps down to sweat all over them … give the girls 30 years and it’s not all that different from Al Green’s crowd last month. But we digress.

While Phoenix have always been a favourite among pop’s tastemakers, it’s clear Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix – the band’s fourth studio effort – has been the dam-buster commercially. As proven by the sea of bodies shimmying along to the Wolfgang-heavy set-list, the band have definitely made the transition from edgy indie proposition to genuine pop stars. Older singles like Too Young and Long Distance Call remind us that they’ve always been capable of great songs, they just haven’t had an audience quite as large as this to play them to. Such is the enthusiasm of the fans that Mars enters the fray himself, even skipping up into the bleachers for a brief serenade from the cheap seats. Crowd-surfing back to the stage, we get a brief break before Mars and guitarist Christian Mazzalai provide a cover of Air’s Playground Love (Mars did vocals for the original under a pseudonym) and an acoustic rendition of Everything Is Everything. The rest of the band return and they close with a rapturous extended version of 1901, leaving the fans elated. Like Pulp, who also came into popularity later in their career, Phoenix have built on cultish roots to become bona-fide stadium stars. And if they keep writing crystalline pop with the same unaffected naturalism that got them this far, there’s really no reason why they can’t go even further.

MORGAN JOHNSON & TOPHER HEALY

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