From hospital ward to headline set: Viagra Boys at Alexandra Palace review
The crowd at Viagra Boy’s sold-out Alexandra Palace gig, which doubled as their biggest-ever headline show so far in their decade-long career, was always going to be jacked up with testosterone. The Swedish post-punk bands’ high-voltage mixture of grit, sleaze, and anarchy amalgamates into high-energy Man Music. Music for the burly, the boozy, and the brazen.
This isn’t to say that Viagra Boys haven’t forged a community where everyone is welcome – on the contrary, their political outspokenness airs continually on the side of the unfairly oppressed – but as I skittered into the fizzing queues outside the iconic venue, I was already pissed off. So many men shouting about “flappy giblets”. So cagey. So many security guards, questioning why a girl like me might be there to review the night. So many hurdles that didn’t need to be there because of a judgment made out of the grimy back-alley of the patriarchy.
Thankfully, Getdown Services were there to right the wrongs. The indie duo opened the huge event with a sharp 30-minute set that picked up the perilous energy and transformed it into fun-loving communal gold by way of teeth-gnashingly good tunes. Josh Law and Ben Sadler, who are also perhaps the industry’s nicest men alive, hopped and skipped with unfettered glee as they pummelled through bangers like ‘Evil on Tap’ and ‘Get Back Jamie’. “We don’t know why we’re here either!” they laughed after an intense round of “Oggy Oggy Oggy,” answering a question no one in the attentive audience was asking.
The pair would dish up the evening’s first criticism: that of the venue itself, which had demanded 25% of their merchandise sales for, as they explained on stage, “no reason – it’s literally a palace, they can go fuck themselves.” The pair also revealed that Alexandra Palace had requested £2,500 for video footage of a single song; Getdown told the “salaried wankers” where to stick it before closing with the rapturous ‘Dog Dribble’, which saw Law launch himself into the crowd, all but breaking down the formal barriers of the gargantuan gig.
Unfortunately, when Viagra Boys took to the stage not 45 minutes later, it became quickly evident that frontman Sebastian Murphy wouldn’t quite be able to emulate such unbridled physical prowess. After a thunderous entrance with the opener from their 2025 release, Viagra boys, ‘Man of Meat’, a crestfallen Murphy admitted that he’d woken up that very morning – which was, to add insult to injury, his 36th birthday – and was forced to go to the hospital for a back pain so immense it felt as if “somebody has shot me in the back of the lung”.
Throughout the 19-song set, Murphy would litter small reminders of his condition between their raw, rebellious renditions. “I’m in so much pain I’m hallucinating,” he confessed, even lying down and groaning into the microphone as an abrasive brass segment married with jerky strobe lights bloomed with an idiosyncratic intensity Murphy couldn’t quite match.
What was lost in energy was somewhat made up for with emotional authenticity: all signs pointed to one of the biggest nights in their career so far. Murphy shouted out to his parents, who were in attendance, and spent a couple of minutes reminiscing about when he “almost died” at “some chick’s party” when he was 16. With pockets full of prescription drugs, he had, somewhat cheesily, prayed to God to save him from drowning beneath the fixture of a pool cover so he could go on, two decades later, to headline Ally Pally. The rockers infamously never take themselves too seriously, though this nostalgic narration was all but saccharine in comparison to other expletive addresses.
Later, in what they claimed was a live debut, they dedicated the 2020 song, ‘Lick The Bag’, to co-founding guitarist Benjamin Vallé, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 47. Awash in a delicate blue, the band exhibited their delicate side with genuine honesty, as they launched next into the nearest their discography boasts of a ballad, ‘Medicine for Horses’. The band known for fist-punching anti-establishment bangers can operate just as expertly when they let the guitar shreds rest for a minute.
It was never going to be a Viagra Boys show without a political statement, and, penetrating as ever, Murphy took aim at the British and American government for their links to Israel. Before leading the room through an impassioned “Free, free Palestine!” chant, the band called out the UK’s stance on showing solidarity with Palestine, lambasting the “fucked up times” we exist within. Thankfully, their growling, gritty post-punk was the perfect answer to the hopeless determinism of the worsening situation.
Though he could only side-step like a crab or carry out some warped Macarena movements, Murphy’s vocals were undeniable, gruff and round, cutting clearly through the heavy work of the six-piece who played deftly and diligently below a screen that, more often than not, captured the writhing crowd as circle pits spun asunder. But an unruly crowd is just that – unmoored, rapacious, and easily misled. The band charged through fan-favourite ‘Sports’ without instruction for the crowd, whose looseness might’ve benefited from some form of command.
This became all the more clear as Murphy ordered the room to split in half for their pre-encore song, ‘Research Chemicals’; the reformation jolted the 10,000 fans back into focus. The wandering waywardness evolved into a remembrance of punk’s greatest consequence: bodies slamming into one another. Pent-up energy expelled and expunged into the night. The bruise blossoming in the outline of a handprint on my left shoulder, not 12 hours on, is physical evidence of the ferocious energy Viagra Boys command at the top of their game. Glimpses of this mastery emerged as their jazz-punk infusion reached its feverish heights, but each moment dissipated in the scalding temperatures of the room before the night could knight the titans.
It’s certainly not Murphy’s fault that the biggest gift received on his 36th birthday was agonising back pain, but the uproarious crowd could’ve used a little more focus from the formidable frontman. Still, in a night marked with political statements, emotional catharsis, and an electric dose of punk, Viagra Boys proved themselves as important and intense as ever.
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