It’s been 10 years since the release of Meet the Vamps and the audience is a mix of all ages. 10 years is a significant milestone in a band’s career and to maintain relevance and an adoring fan base for that long is cause for celebration.

First up was Soap, a guitar driven rock band formerly known as The Tyne. This is their biggest UK tour since opening for Busted back in 2023 and there is a lot of crossover between all the bands listed here. They all had to prove they were more than just a boy band who happened to play instruments and it seems that they’ve all proved themselves.

The band came on to the theme to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, presumably they were all imagining a black title card that read “The Gang Open for The Vamps” and then they were straight into it. They had a great collection of fun pop rock tracks like Funeral and Awkward Now. They even had a dance designed for TikTok on the song Get out of my House, it’s no Apple but it’s still easy to learn and replicate on social media.

The band had so much energy and made use of the space they had. There’s an almost 90s pop rock feeling to some of these tracks and that will surely help quell that feeling of being too old to enjoy their music, it sounds ridiculous but it’s a feeling many older pop fans go through at a certain age.

It’s difficult to find some of these songs on streaming services so I guess you’re just going to have to go see them on their UK tour this October. Considering the size of some of these venues, it’ll be worth it to see them before they start playing gigantic mega shows for all their adoring fans.

Up next was Talia Mar and her set felt the most out of place but it still provided some variety. Her set was full of highly polished pop songs as well as a mix of covers including No Scrubs by TLC and even Wildest Dreams by Taylor Swift.

Talia has this dramatic Ariana Grande style stage presence and that is really clear from the first song of the set, Bored. There’s a great deal of other influences shine through, at times you can make out a Billie Eilish cadence and Forget About Your Ex sounds sonically similar to her British pop peer Caity Baser.

Talia may have been a strange addition to this bill but her energy, dry sense of humour and humble stage presence were a welcome change to the big guitar driven bravado that dominated the rest of the night.

After a short break, The Vamps made it to the stage with a gigantic set up of blinding lights, visualisers and pyrotechnics. An immediately impressive bit of stage design, if a bit overwhelming from first glance. The band opened with the high energy of Wild Heart, a youthful rocker that hasn’t aged in the time it has been released and likely won’t age poorly as long as there are rock fans that are young at heart.

As mentioned before, the set is made up of tracks from Meet the Vamps but with later tracks sprinkled throughout. Classics like Dangerous, the tropical island vibes of Cecilia and the almost constant audience participation on tracks like Hurricane and Girls on TV gave this set so much more variety than one would expect from a band like The Vamps.

The Vamps are a band that came out during the boy band boom of the 2010s and it would be cynical to assume that it’s the only reason they continued to have relevance. The Vamps are clearly very passionate songwriters who love what they do and prioritise their friendship and on stage chemistry, the fact that they still have such devoted and intense fans of all ages seems like a bonus for them.

There were some surprisingly heavy moments with heavy guitar work and bombastic drumming from Tristan Evans as he leads the band massive anthems like Wake Up and Golden. He even has a fairly short drum solo, something I never expected to see at a pop rock show like this. The Vamps counteracted this with a mellow and almost intimate acoustic setcomplete with a wealth of good natured messing about as well as the gift of a pair of sunglasses. Remember, throwing stuff at the band is not cool so try to aim away from them if you desperately have to throw something.

There were a lot of surprises like this throughout the show. You’d be forgiven for thinking a band like The Vamps was just a group of pretty boys that happen to know how to play their instruments well enough to put together a collection of four chord pop songs, there’s clearly a lot of love put into this whole experience and that translates into the audience who clearly adore the whole band and their time as a united fanbase.