Only traces of their eerie early spirit remain: Kings of Leon, at OVO Hydro, reviewed

A few years ago, I spoke to Mick Jagger and asked him which of the (relatively) new crop of rock groups he rated. It was a short list, I recall, and not hugely inspiring, but Kings of Leon made the cut. ‘They have a kind of Texas weirdness that you don’t find in a lot of modern rock bands,’ he reckoned. ‘I like their quirkiness, and the fact that you can hear the countryish and blues thing behind them, but it’s not that obvious.’

Aside from the fact that they are from Tennessee, not Texas, it felt like a reasonably astute summation of Kings of Leon’s appeal when they first broke through in the mid-2000s. The whiff of Southern Gothic, an unsettling sense of strange fruit, over-ripening, played around the edges of their otherwise pretty straightforward rock and roll. Maybe it was down to genes. The band is composed of three brothers – Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill, alongside cousin Matthew Followill – whose father Ivan was a travelling Pentecostal preacher. Scooting around the deep south spreading the gospel is precisely the kind of peculiar peripatetic upbringing bound to twist your wires a little.

While communing with all the lodestar rock groups – the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Thin Lizzy, Pixies – Kings of Leon were capable of making a desolate, strangely beautiful sound all of their own, with a thread of kinship to the half-forgotten bluesmen of Clarksdale and the thin, spooky mountain music of the Appalachians. Caleb Followill’s slurred vocals possessed a murky backwoods menace but buried in the tales of sex and cars and sex, embedded far below the howling choruses, lay a deeper understanding of the roots of American music, and an ache of vulnerability.

But it’s hard to stay bent when success, that great straightener, bears down.