Live Review Guide
We Are Scientists
It’s been a busy few weeks for We Are Scientists. In the lead up to their upcoming album ‘Qualifying Miles’, impressively their 9th to date, they’ve been across Europe and up and down the UK touring.
After their appearance at Live at Leeds 2025, they were back at Temple Newsam again just 7 days later to support Kaiser Chiefs at their homecoming show.
With Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight and The Cribs all playing 20th anniversary album sets, We Are Scientists couldn’t resist also getting in on the act to celebrate their breakthrough album ‘With Love and Squalor’.
With their trademark cat artwork adorning the stage backdrop, they opened their set with the instantly recognisable riff of ‘This Scene is Dead’.
They were billed relatively early in the day with a set time of just 40 minutes, which meant there was only time for songs from ‘With Love and Squalor’. The We Are Scientists die-hards will have plenty of chance to hear their new material on other tour dates though. Today was purely about celebrating the best of 2005 indie.
And so they ran through each of the tracks from their beloved breakthrough album. It was a reminder of just how strong an album it was, with non-singles like ‘Inaction’, ‘Call Backs’ and ‘Cash Cow’ getting the crowd on their feet.
But the more widely known hits were the inevitable highlights for the sun and beer soaked crowd at Temple Newsam. Even a miscue in starting ‘It’s A Hit’ couldn’t stop the crowd from lapping up their classic catchy riffs and melodies.
Perhaps their biggest hit to date is the indie disco staple ‘Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt’, which became the first universal sing along moment of the day. While ‘The Great Escape’ hit the crowd with just as much energy and catchiness.
It would have been fun to hear more classic songs of theirs such as ‘After Hours’ and ‘Rules Don’t Stop’, as well as some of the newest material from the honorary British indie legends from New York. But it was fun to truly commemorate and celebrate an album that helped define the sound of the mid-2000s British indie revival.
Based on the number of people who turned out on this day to hear classic albums from 2005, perhaps this scene isn’t quite dead yet.
The Coral
As the most prolific band present on the bill supporting Kaiser Chiefs, with 12 albums since their self-titled debut in 2002, they could have easily joined in on the anniversary nostalgia. Especially with 2005’s ‘The Invisible Invasion’ being one of their most successful and including the legendary ‘In The Morning’.
However, they resisted the temptation and instead treated the crowd to a whistle-stop tour of the best of The Coral’s past and present.
On a sunny day of ever-flowing beers at the grassy hill site of Temple Newsam, The Coral’s upbeat indie-folk was perfect for the occasion. Opening tracks ‘Bill McCai’ and ‘Pass It On’ from ‘Magic & Medicine’ lifted the already high spirits of the crowd, before dazzling with the psychedelic influenced ‘Simon Diamond’.
Next was a taste of their ambitious fairground influenced 2021 double-album ‘Coral Island’ with ‘Faceless Angel’ and ‘Love Undiscovered’. While still looking to innovate more than 2 decades on, they clearly didn’t lose their catchy indie-folk trademark sound.
After a charming cover of The Doors’ classic ‘People Are Strange’, ‘That’s Where She Belongs’ showed a taste of their latest album, 2023’s ‘Sea of Mirrors’ which showed a continued evolution of instrumentation and arrangement.
Anyone laid on the grass drifting off to their dulcet tones would have been woken up by the rare sound of fast tempo drums and distorted wailing guitar solos of ‘In The Rain’, a rare moment of rocking out by The Coral.
After ‘Jacqueline’, the familiar keys of ‘In The Morning’ soon got everyone on their feet for one of the all-time summertime songs. 20 years on, it still sounded just as refreshing and ready made for days like these.
There was another rare appearance of a driven guitar line on ‘Holy Revelation’, which didn’t sound too unlike a lighter Queens of the Stone Age track with its fuzzy octave pedal guitars.
But to close the set, The Coral well and truly returned their established blueprint with their 2002 breakthrough hit ‘Dreaming of You’. It’s another warm weather hit, with a bouncing bass line that’s impossible not to tap your foot along to.
While The Coral may not have the wailing guitars of The Cribs, the sizzling swagger of Razorlight or the crowd-whipping hits of Kaiser Chiefs, they do have 2 decades of songs perfect for a summer’s afternoon on a festival ground.
The Cribs
It’s been a fairly quiet 12 months for The Cribs. Their last live show was at this exact location a year ago for Live at Leeds 2024, which we were also there for. But it would’ve been hard to say no to a return to West Yorkshire to support fellow locals Kaiser Chiefs.
In the spirit of celebrating the best of 2005, The Cribs joined Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight and We Are Scientists in performing a 20th anniversary set, celebrating their classic album ‘The New Fellas’.
Arriving on stage to the surprising choice of Aztec Camera’s ‘Somewhere In My Heart’, the Jarman brothers soon launched into action with album opener ‘Hey Scenesters!’. If you need a song to take you back to the sweat and sticky floors of mid 2000s indie club nights, there are few better than this.
Unlike the other bands here today celebrating the 20th anniversary of their respective albums, it was only The Cribs who faithfully stuck to the original track list order.
This meant after ‘I’m Alright Me’, which saw perhaps too much enthusiasm from the crowd when singing back the refrain “Take drugs, don’t eat”, and ‘Martell’, The Cribs’ fans here knew exactly what was coming next.
The Cribs have perhaps the best ability of their contemporaries for gritty guitar lines and vocals, and ‘Mirror Kissers’ is gritty to a fantastic degree. It sparked frenzied movement from the crowd in the big top tent at Live at Leeds last year, and even on the wider terrain of the main stage here at Temple Newsam it had the same effect.
The only break from the track listing of ‘The New Fellas’ was a cover of Huggy Bear’s ‘Concrete Life’, which has been in and out of their set lists for the past 20 years.
Normal service then resumed with the sing along chorus of ‘We Can No Longer Cheat You’, before running through the rest of the album with the title track and album closer ‘Things Aren’t Gonna Change’ highlights of this section.
The only slight disappointment was that by the time the album run through had been completed, it left little time for the best of the rest of The Cribs. Fittingly, ‘The New Fellas’ era non-album single ‘You’re Gonna Lose Us’ got a play, before they closed out with the universally loved ‘Men’s Needs’.
Thankfully for those wanting more it won’t be another 12 months before the next Cribs show, with further headline shows and festival appearances to come over the summer.
Razorlight
On a balmy day of 2000s indie nostalgia culminating in a headline set by Kaiser Chiefs, they were preceded by Razorlight for a 20th anniversary set of their breakthrough album ‘Up All Night’.
Joined again by founding members Björn Ågren and Andy Burrows, Johnny Borrell’s Razorlight have been busy again recently, with a new album ‘Planet Nowhere’ released in 2024 and a full UK tour at the beginning of this year.
But as with fellow indie mainstays Kaiser Chiefs, The Cribs and We Are Scientists, the set on this day would be focused on their early career glories.
They opened with the familiar riff of the energetic ‘Rip It Up’, before a brief deviation from ‘Up All Night’ for their smash hit ‘In The Morning’.
Avid Razorlight fans were thrilled to hear ‘Stumble and Fall’ and ‘Vice’, before the full crowd joined Johnny Borrell in singing their first real breakthrough single ‘Golden Touch’. Even 20 years on, he sounded just as assured and self-confident on stage as in his mid-20s festival headlining prime.
The deep dives into the album continued with the title track, plus ‘Which Way Is Out’ and ‘In The City’, and then another brief visit to their self-titled 2006 album for the jaunty ‘Before I Fall To Pieces’. Stripped back from some of the pretention Borrell may have been accused from in their heyday, it’s a track that shows off their trademark for catchy riffs and vocal hooks.
Even the Razorlight die-hards may not have known the next track up. ‘Sugar High’ was a brand new unreleased song, only played a few times earlier this year in their headline tour.
They will have known the next track though. ‘Don’t Go Back to Dalston’ is a track that oozes the indie sleaze world they emerged from.
Many in the crowd may not have kept up to date with Razorlight’s latest material, but they were given a glimpse of their last album ‘Planet Nowhere’ with ‘Cool People’. The sneering opening line of “Who writes this shit?” and later bridge of “What do you want me to do? Turn up in a pair of shades and pout?… Lets talk about algorithms, So many people stream me, uh!” showed that Borrell hasn’t lost that previously high-profile contentious attitude to his lyrics.
Away from the current hot topics of streaming and algorithms, Razorlight took us back to a simpler time with one of their most beloved tracks, ‘Somewhere Else’. It’s one of the great indie choruses of the era, and you could almost hear the thousands singing back to Borrell that the ‘Somewhere Else’ they’d like to be is back in 2005.
To finish off, it could only be one song. ‘America’ is a particular track of theirs that was panned at the time for being pretentious and trite, but it also became their first and only UK number 1 single.
Its opening notes received one of the biggest cheers of the day, and the irresistable chorus will have been sung along to by even the harshest of critics of theirs.
Even in a tight fitting t-shirt that may well have been from 2005 too, Johnny Borrell in 2025 shows he has learned from the highs and lows of their success to become a mature well rounded musician. But that’s not to say he has lost his edge. While he didn’t play it on this day, the fact their last album included a track called ‘Taylor Swift = US Soft Propaganda’ is clear evidence that he’s keen to test the limits of societal boundaries.
Kaiser Chiefs
A future (or even current) music historian may point to 2005 as the moment in British music where the indie revival burst out from sweaty nightclubs and the pages of NME into an unsuspecting mainstream.
An increasingly bland alternative scene had been given a jump-start by the dual threat of the messy Libertines and insatiably cool Strokes at the beginning of the millennium. But 2005 marked the revival of British indie bands taking the next step and becoming chart-topping household names.
Alongside Arctic Monkeys, this rush of success for Northern indie bands in particular was also led by Kaiser Chiefs and their now 7 times Platinum debut album ‘Employment’.
The impact this single-laden album had on British music at the time can be summed up by recalling that they won a staggering 3 awards from 5 nominations at the 2006 Brit Awards.
They won the most awards of any nominated artists that year, beating out the likes of Oasis, Gorillaz and Coldplay for the Best British Group, Best British Rock Act and Best British Live Act awards.
And now 20 years later, the band returned to their hometown to celebrate this album by playing it in full.
Before Kaiser Chiefs arrived on stage, fans were treated to We Are Scientists celebrating 20 years of ‘With Love & Squalor’, The Cribs celebrating 20 years of ‘The New Fellas’, and Razorlight celebrating 20 years of ‘Up All Night’, as well as a performance from The Coral.
The event poster read like an NME best of album of 2005 list. Incidentally, on this actual list ‘Employment’ came 5th behind Bloc Party’s ‘Silent Alarm’, which was also played in full on the very same stage just the previous week, as we reviewed here.
Arriving on stage in a trademark striped blazer, Ricky Wilson soon led the crowd into a sing along to the energetic ‘Everyday I Love You Less and Less’.
The surprise of the opening riff to ‘I Predict a Riot’ immediately following was tempered slightly by a tech miscue which meant starting again, but once the song was in full flow the crowd could not believe their luck at such a hit heavy start to the set.
The hits continued to come too, with the melodic ‘Modern Way’ next, followed by fan favourite ‘Na Na Na Na Naa’. Considering Ricky Wilson made a point of retiring adding their trademark big build up “woahs” in their songs after ‘Employment’, presumably for the sake of his vocal health, it was no surprise that he gave himself a rest after this with the more melodic ‘You Can Have It All’.
We knew that Kaiser Chiefs would have something up their sleeve for this momentous hometown show, but the first big reveal was completely unexpected.
For the first time since 2012, founding drummer Nick Hodgson joined them on stage to play acoustic guitar on ‘Oh My God’. You could tell it was a special moment for Nick and the band, as well as the die-hard Kaiser Chiefs fans who remember his time in the band.
The rest of the first part of the set saw them complete the rest of the track-list of ‘Employment’, with classics such as ‘Born To Be A Dancer’, ‘Saturday Night’ and‘Time Honoured Tradition’, before a deeper cut of ‘Take My Temperature’, a Japanese edition bonus track.
On a day where the crowd was filled with the white and yellow of Leeds United (plus plenty sporting shirts from the original Kaizer Chiefs), the arrival of the Championship trophy on the stage was very well received as the band broke into a cover of ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’.
However, not just happy to have the trophy placed next to them, they brought out Leeds United striker Patrick Bamford (wearing a retro Mark Viduka Leeds United shirt) to play acoustic guitar on a second rendition of ‘I Predict A Riot’.
The crowd needed no invitation to join in a second time around, this time celebrating even more thunderously while Ricky Wilson waved the trophy around on stage.
Kaiser Chiefs and Leeds United have always been intrinsically linked, from picking their name from former captain Lucas Radebe’s first club, Kaizer Chiefs, to later playing a Leeds United centenary show at Elland Road in 2019. Therefore it was only fitting that in the month after the club lifted the Championship trophy, this achievement would be celebrated in style.
Back to business, they finished off the set with a round-up of their greatest post-‘Employment’ hits, starting with the satirising ‘Never Miss a Beat’.
After ‘Hole In My Soul’, it was time for their first and only number 1 single to date. ‘Ruby’ was a song born for a festival field with its irresistibly catchy chorus, and the thousands at Temple Newsam duly delivered.
On a night of nostalgia, there was only a brief visit to their last album with 2024’s ‘Reasons to Stay Alive’. There will be other shows to demonstrate the strengths of their recent endeavours, but on an occasion like this they did right to stick to the hits.
And so they did, with ‘Coming Home’ and finally a triumphant final chant along moment on ‘The Angry Mob’. Once going, it seemed like the crowd could have kept going with the final refrain of “We are the angry mob, We read the papers everyday…” for hours.
It was well and truly a show 20 years in the making. For the fans who have had these songs stuck in their heads for the past 20 years, for the next generation of fans who have fallen in love with this classic album, and for a band back home in a city that had launched them from The Cockpit to unfathomable heights.
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