From David Bowie to Kate Bush: our critics pick their favourite ever gigs

Sometimes you just know you’re witnessing a performance that will be talked about for decades to come, or sometimes you realise it much later.

But what makes a truly memorable gig? A live show that doesn’t just recreate the music on the record, but adds more dimension and revealing persona, becoming an experience that’s unifying, electric – and that can change lives. Or a gig that rips up the rule books and does something so unique that it cannot possibly be forgotten. We asked our critics Fiona Sturges, Mark Beaumont, Lucy Jones, Chris Harvey, David Lister, Patrick Smith, Alex Pollard, Roisin O’Connor and Martin Chilton for their greatest gigs ever.

Their picks span the decades, from iconic concerts (Live Aid, David Bowie), legendary performers (Kate Bush, Nick Cave) and pioneering artists no longer with us (Bobby Womack, Leonard Cohen) to thrilling sets early in a band’s career (Foals, Crystal Castles).

David Bowie, Rainbow Theatre, 1972

The long gone Rainbow in London’s Finsbury Park was one of the great rock venues, and though I was young at the time it would be impossible to forget the impact of Bowie in one of his first outings as Ziggy Stardust. “They haven’t even finished building the stage,” I said with breathtaking naivety to the person next to me, on observing the scaffolding and ladder. Of course, it was all part of the Ziggy theatrics, a show that began with David/Ziggy walking out to the drums of “Five Years” and continued with mime, flamboyance and songs that have all become classics. I remember his appearance being heralded by music from Beethoven’s Ninth (also used in A Clockwork Orange, the film being current at the time). In those years Bowie always used it as his theme music. I also remember being blown away by the support act – a fresh, imaginative outfit called Roxy Music. David Lister

Dolly Parton, Dominion Theatre, 1983

Truly charismatic performers leave an indelible impression and I marvelled at the way Chuck Berry had the crowd in the palm of his hand when I saw him in the 1970s. But few could match Dolly Parton in her prime for her larger-than-life enthusiasm and sheer sense of fun. When the country superstar came to London’s Dominion Theatre in 1983, she played some mean finger-picking banjo, sang beautifully, especially on an a capella version of “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind?” and even did an Elvis impression. Her concert was filmed for a video release and about half an hour after the crowd had left, they brought in a large group of young punks and goths (to intercut into crowd shots) and suggest an edgy young following. Happily, I had stayed around and saw her deliver this impromptu extra set, which was full of risque jokes and blue banter. There’s no one quite like her. Martin Chilton

Live Aid, Wembley Stadium, 1985

You don’t usually realise you’re present at what will become a moment in history. But that sunny July afternoon at Wembley Stadium felt special right from the off, even if the off was Status Quo doing “Rockin’ All Over The World”. There were numerous stand-out moments; perhaps on paper the biggest was the return of Paul McCartney, topping the bill after nearly five years self-enforced absence from high-profile performing following the shooting of John Lennon. Somewhat sadly the sound failed for part of “Let It Be”, but we can draw a veil over that. The most stunning set of the day came from Queen: a high energy medley through “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Radio Ga Ga” to “We Will Rock You” and “We Are The Champions”. No one fired up the crowd quite as much that day. And since the band had not been at their most visible around that time, this proved to be their resurrection. David Lister

BB King, Hammersmith Odeon, 1985

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Blues titan BB King released two of the greatest concert albums of the 20th century in Live at the Regal (1964) and Live in Cook County Jail (1971). Even though he was 60 when I saw him at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in 1985, he was still full of energy. He sang with passion and his guitar work was transcendent, especially on gloriously funky version of “The Thrill is Gone”. I skipped my graduation ceremony for the concert and had the good fortune to bump into an old family friend called Ray Bolden, who had worked at Dobell’s record shop in Charing Cross Road. King’s face lit up to see Ray, who had put him up in his London flat in the 1950s. The blues superstar could not have been friendlier, despite his tiredness after a long gig. Seeing Muddy Waters live in 1979 was special but BB King at full power, bending guitar notes like no one else, topped even that. Martin Chilton

Rollercoaster Tour, Brixton Academy, 1992

It was billed as the British Lollapalooza, but it was nothing so safe. When The Jesus & Mary Chain reached the status of noisenik godheads with their fourth album Honey’s Dead in 1992, they decided to put together a visceral modern rock revue tour called Rollercoaster that’s still ringing in my ears almost 30 years on.

Of the three revolving support acts, Blur opened the night, mid-transformation from baggy latecomers to art-pop pioneers. With Damon Albarn flinging himself wildly around the stage and clambering up amp stacks, they premiered ferocious second-album character studies like “Colin Zeal” while screening films of the journey of meat from slaughterhouse to defecation, in reverse. Most crucially, with their all-horns-blazing new single “Popscene”, they kick-started Britpop right before our eyes. Dinosaur Jr were a sludgy grunge mess by comparison, but My Bloody Valentine blew minds and eardrums alike. As their high-volume amorphous dream-pop reached ear-splitting climax for the 10-minute noise assault known as “the holocaust section”, pints were shaken out of people’s hands, I saw security men running for cover and most people sat dumbstruck, wondering if the band were going to keep playing it until everyone was dead.

The Mary Chain, meanwhile, were at peak malicious, Jim Reid sneering “I wanna die just like Jesus Christ” in a storm of strobes during “Reverence” and dancing about heart attacks on a momentous “Far Gone And Out”. I left with my skull buzzing, my eyes opened and my tastes rearranged, convinced I’d seen the new music, and I had. A gig that didn’t just make my night, it made me. Mark Beaumont

Pixies, Brixton Academy, 2004

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Reunion gigs aren’t really for the nostalgia crowd. They’re for patching up the lives that missed out. I’ve no idea why I decided not to go see Pixies, whom I adored like a cult leader but had never seen live, at the Crystal Palace Bowl in 1991. Perhaps it was exam time, or maybe as a born-and-bred north Londoner I was scared of going to south London in case I got stuck in the swamps. “I’ll catch them next time,” I thought, little knowing that “next time” would be 13 years away.

So when Pixies came onto a London stage on my birthday in 2004 and played Pixies songs – and music just doesn’t get better than that – it was pure relief, euphoria and dark-hearted epiphany. “Tame” sent me feral, “Gigantic” was titanic, “Bone Machine” crushed out my marrow. Black Francis snarled, barked and ranted through “Gouge Away”, “Monkey Gone To Heaven” and “Debaser”, every bit the demented pervert preacher he ever was; Kim Deal’s angelic coos and bass melodies made an unholy pact with Joey Santiago’s werewolf guitar riffs, seemingly played with a plectrum made of Satan’s fingernail. Of their four Brixton dates that week, I lost every ounce of my s*** at three. Best gigs ever, no particular order. Mark Beaumont

Foals, Buffalo Bar, 2007

If you spent much time in north London’s tiny, underground, and now defunct, Buffalo Bar in the 2000s, chances are you’d have caught early gigs from the likes of Bloc Party, The Libertines, The Maccabees – or Foals. Their show there was a whole 14 months before the release of their debut album Antidotes, and it justified their precocious reputation as a live act. That night, the energy of their high-octane math rock was infectious; it’s not often that you see a band in their earliest days and know that this is probably the last time you’ll be able to reach out and touch them. Their drive for perfection was clear right from the start, when Yannis Philippakis demanded “more guitar”. His request granted, the songs followed: “The French Open”, “Balloons”, “Hummer”, “Mathletics”, all fuelled by astoundingly complex polyrhythms, interweaving staccato synths and guitar played high on the fretboard in angular electro harmonies, set to punk-disco techno beats and urgent new wave vocals. And there was nothing so ordinary as chords, or verse-chorus structure. I’d never seen a rock gig so precisely engineered (a sticker on the synth read ”Math is for Everyone“), yet so exhilarating. There was a true sense we’d discovered something great. Elisa Bray

Crystal Castles, Camden Crawl, 2008

Problematic in every way given singer Alice Glass’s October 2017 statement accusing her former bandmate Ethan Kath of sexual abuse, non-consensual sex and controlling behaviour, but this short set in front of a small crowd in a Camden bar was proof that when a performer truly plugs into the mother lode, the intensity they generate can burn itself into your retinas and shake your soul. Glass was 19 years old, and for most of the set just a blur of spectral movement frozen into violent shapes by an almost incessant strobe; singing, shouting and screaming her way through songs such as “Courtship Dating”. The result was a reminder that whenever one of your heroes gets on stage to try to channel that primal essence of rock’n’roll – or whatever the hell it is – most of the time, they’re just trying to find an echo of something that once flowed through them. That can go on for 50 years or more. There’s sadness now in the memory, but on this day in April 2008, Glass had it. Chris Harvey

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Brighton Centre, 2008

It used to be that rock’n’roll was a young person’s game; anyone over the age of 50 still tearing it up on stage needed to calm down and have a word with themselves. Nick Cave, the latter-day harbinger of the apocalypse still identifiable by his raven hair and pallbearer’s suit, has consistently shown us the idiocy of this thinking. I’ve seen Cave perform scores of times and he has never let me down, but this show, which coincided with the release of the album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, was a whole new level of spectacular: funny, furious, life-affirming, heavy on the biblical melodrama. Alongside the Bad Seeds, then operating as a seven-piece coolly attired in suits, open-necked shirts and slicked-back hair, Cave showed how musical talent can deepen rather than ebb in mid-life, and how he was – and indeed remains – untouchable in terms of intellect, charisma and sheer feral energy. Fiona Sturges

Leonard Cohen, Benicassim Festival, 2008

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Leonard Cohen steps onto the stage, dressed in grey shirt and tie, black waistcoat, trilby concealing his white hair. It’s sweltering. And yet Cohen, in his mid seventies, is barely breaking into a sweat. Much like his attire, the songs – such as “Dance Me to the End of Love” and “So Long, Marianne” – are immaculate, his voice no longer a wail but a raw, rumbling baritone. The Spanish sun is beating down and my friends and I are genuflecting before one of the greatest ever lyricists. This was to be the only time I'd see him live and no performance has ever, in terms of pure emotional intensity, targeted my tear duct with such laser-guided precision as his rendition of “Hallelujah”. The song’s been covered by everyone from Jeff Buckley to Alexandra Burke, but sung by him that day, it’s surely never felt as moving. Patrick Smith

Bobby Womack, Latitude, 2013

The great Sixties and Seventies soul singers are nearly all gone now, and I doubt we’ll ever see their like again. Bobby Womack had recovered from colon cancer but was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and less than a year from his death in June 2014, when he played the UK in the summer of 2013. He came on stage on a sunny Saturday afternoon at the Latitude festival, to play songs from his brilliant comeback album, The Bravest Man in the Universe, to a basking, picnicking audience. “All soul singers come from gospel,” he told them. Womack’s voice still seemed like a gift from God. The years of cocaine addiction hadn’t altered its richness and warmth. To be in the presence of Womack that day, knowing it would likely be the last time, was very special. Chris Harvey

St Vincent, End of the Road, 2014

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Most rock stars, terrified of seeming to be trying too hard, would never dream of hiring a choreographer. But St Vincent, aka Annie Clark, is no ordinary rock star. For her Digital Witness tour, the musician recruited Annie B Carson to help her dream up a procession of strange, shuffling moves to perform alongside her brilliant self-titled fourth album. At End of the Road Festival – a small, Dorset delight which she had played with David Byrne a year earlier – her headline set was scuzzy, eccentric, and thrilling. At one point, without missing a lick on her guitar, she rolled herself down an oversized flight of white stairs like a glitching robot. Then again, no robot can play guitar like that. Alexandra Pollard

Kate Bush, Hammersmith Apollo, 2014

After 35 years away from the stage it was a moment Kate Bush fans never thought would happen. Beforehand, I was reporting from outside the venue for NME and the excitement and energy was extraordinary, like nothing I’ve ever experienced. One woman told me it would be fine if she died after the gig because she would die happy. The show started with a “greatest hits” section. And then it all got a bit more, well, Kate Bush, with a dramatic adaptation of The Ninth Wave, the suite of seven songs that make up side two of Hounds of Love. Sinking ships, confetti cannons, surreal fish people and a soliloquy about sausages. Act three was more pastoral. The second disc of Aerial, The Sky of Honey, was performed in front of the most beautiful visuals I’ve ever seen: birds, a red sun, a moon tilting on its axis and then Kate suspended into the air. Pure theatre. As we filed out, there was a sense that the audience was stunned. I still am. Lucy Jones

Patti Smith, Field Day, 2015

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There are certain artists you feel like you’ve waited a lifetime to see perform live. To date, I’ve seen Patti Smith three times, but nothing compares to her 2015 set at Field Day in Victoria Park, London. She was celebrating the 40th anniversary of her seminal 1975 album Horses. The sky was a perfect blue, and the sun was still blazing hot at 7pm. “I’m sorry about the dark glasses,” Smith said by way of introduction. “I’m not trying to be cool, it’s just, you know… the sun.” “You’re the f***ing coolest!” a fan screamed back. From there, she and her band, including long-serving guitarist Lenny Kaye, embarked on a blistering set that had myself, and many other audience members, in tears. Smith is a ferocious performer, spitting and snarling and howling her lyrics; tearing up her guitar as though it just insulted one of her favourite poets. It didn’t matter if she messed up, as she did on “Break it Up”, because she offered the instantly immortal words: “I don’t do nothing perfect. I only f*** up perfect.” You felt you were in the presence of something momentous. Roisin O’Connor

D’Angelo, Hammersmith Apollo, 2015

When D’Angelo released his surprise third record – the politically fraught Black Messiah – it ended the 14-year hiatus that followed 2000’s Voodoo. It also reminded music fans that the American hip-hop artist and multi-instrumentalist was still as culturally relevant – and monumentally talented – as he was back then. The subsequent tour, where he was accompanied by his eight-strong band The Vanguard, was a visceral, quasi-religious experience that was both uplifting and life-affirming. Lead guitarist Jesse Johnson, formerly of Prince-produced outfit The Time, added funky hooks to “Sugah Daddy”, while legendary bassist Pino Palladino took time out from The Who’s live shows to join in the fun. At one point D’Angelo led a classic James Brown funk staple, holding three fingers in the air so the band could respond with three loud vamps. One encore was followed by a second that broke the curfew with free abandon, until D’Angelo was left on stage alone, reflective and blissful as he played out the final notes on a baby Yamaha. It inspired a divine kind of worship, for a show that was appropriately titled The Second Coming. Roisin O’Connor

Lorde, Brighton Centre, 2017

A week before she played Brighton, I reviewed Lorde’s Alexandra Palace show in London. It was a five-star performance – the New Zealand musician exorcised the pain of the breakup she’d chronicled on her brilliant second album Melodrama, twitching and twirling as an abstract house party played out in glass boxes around her. The stage design was so good, in fact, that Kanye West may or may not have nicked it a year later. Seeing her in Brighton the following week, without a notepad in my hand, I saw even more clearly all the intimate nuances of her performance – and was free to give in entirely to the exhilarating, heartbreaking melodrama of it all. Alexandra Pollard

David Byrne, Brighton Centre, 2018

When you’ve been going to gigs for decades, you tend not to expect anything new, just variations – some mind-blowing, others not – on what you have seen before. So when I saw David Byrne’s American Utopia show, it felt like stumbling on the Ark of the Covenant. Here was a man who had been working in music for 40 years completely redrawing the rules of pop performance – no drum riser, no cables, no visible amps or microphones – and taking it deep into the territory of experimental theatre. In opposition to the usual freeform live music setup, this tour was the result of fastidious planning, with everything rehearsed to the last nanosecond. And yet, forever on the move, dressed in matching grey suits and dancing barefoot in formation, Byrne and his 12-piece band were loose-limbed, unfettered and joyous to watch. And the music was pretty great too. Fiona Sturges

Christine and the Queens, Hammersmith Apollo, 2018

Before her short run at Hammersmith Apollo last year, Héloïse Letissier – known as Christine and the Queens, though she dropped all but the “Chris” for her second album – tweeted: “I think we finally have some surprises for those who come to the shows!” She delivered on that promise – falling snow and sand, and a balcony homage to Romeo and Juliet – as she redefined what a pop show could be. With a gender-fluid cohort of athletic dancers, she brought to theatrical life her tumultuous journey towards embracing her pansexual identity, and finding liberation. And we went through all those emotions with her, those alternately tender and powerful vocals never faltering despite the restless dance routines. Everyone was on their feet dancing, and her declaration of inclusivity could not have been more empowering: “Vive everyone!” We left thrilled and elated. Elisa Bray