New blood and old steel: Accept and Tailgunner at indigo at The O2

What I wanted from this past Friday was simple: a nice show, some time with good people, and a proper full stop on the week just gone. Plus a bank holiday weekend waiting on the other side of it. What could go wrong? Well, nothing really. But as we walked up to The O2, what I wasn’t expecting was a queue after queue of teenagers in glitter and bows, all waiting for Ariana Grande in the arena. Pop in the big room, fifty years of German heavy metal in the small one.

I’ll admit I expected the smaller room to be heaving anyway. It wasn’t. Indigo was comfortable rather than packed, which for a band celebrating half a century felt like a shame, though the people who did turn up made up for the gaps. It was my first time at this venue, and I liked it more than I thought I would. The stage sits at a good height, the room has a shape that keeps you close without squashing you, and the sound was clean from where I stood. The crowd were mixed in age but leaned older, and it was fairly obvious most of them had come for one band.

Accept are on the road for “Half A Century Of Metal”, their 50th anniversary tour, with the anniversary record “Teutonic Titans 1976–2026” landing on Napalm Records on 4 September, less than a week after this show. London was the second of three UK dates, sitting between Wolverhampton’s KK’s Steel Mill, which we heard had been flooded with water the night before, and Stonedhead Festival.


Opening the night was Tailgunner, out on their own “Midnight Blitz Tour ’26”.

Tailgunner

1. Midnight Blitz
2. White Death
3. Shadows of War
4. Tears in Rain
5. War in Heaven
6. Barren Lands and Seas of Red
7. Eulogy
8. Guns for Hire

I’d never seen them live before, and within two songs I understood why people keep telling me to. The energy coming off that stage was in a completely different setting to what followed it, and I mean that as a compliment to both bands. Frustratingly, the lights didn’t cooperate for the first few songs, so a band who clearly live for the visual side of this spent a chunk of their set playing in near-darkness. But no fear! The mic stand wrapped in neon saved it, a brilliant touch that turned out to be, for those first songs, more or less the only thing you could see properly.

Craig Cairns has a voice you do not expect from someone that size. It’s a proper old-school heavy metal shriek, with power behind it and no sign of strain, and he uses it like someone who knows exactly what it can do. The rest of the band matched him. There isn’t a moment in a Tailgunner set where somebody isn’t doing something worth watching, and their musicianship holds up under all that movement, which is the part that won me over. Warming up a half-full room at 8pm on a bank holiday Friday was never going to be easy, but by the last two songs they had the people in front of them, and “Guns for Hire” landed like a closer should. Honestly, the whole thing felt like being handed a ticket to one of the very first heavy metal shows, back when this music was still figuring out how loud it was allowed to be.

Photo: Peterson Marti.

Accept

1. Metal Heart
2. Teutonic Terror
3. Restless and Wild
4. London Leatherboys
5. Midnight Mover
6. Run If You Can
7. Monster Man / Aiming High / Wrong Is Right
8. Love Child
9. Fight It Back
10. Up to the Limit
11. Breaker
12. Princess of the Dawn
13. Fast as a Shark
14. Son of a Bitch
15. Balls to the Wall
16. Burning

Accept was spot on. Nothing more, nothing less, just ninety-five minutes of pure metal. This is exactly what you picture when you imagine a band that has been doing this for over fifty years, even if the line-up that gets to celebrate it is mostly not the one that started it. Wolf Hoffmann is the last man standing from the beginning, with Mark Tornillo, Philip Shouse, Martin Motnik and Christopher Williams around him, and the machine they’ve built runs without a single wasted minute.

The medley was my highlight of the night. Stitching “Monster Man”, “Aiming High” and “Wrong Is Right” together could easily have felt like a shortcut, but it played as a deliberate choice and it gave the middle of the set a lift. The other thing I kept coming back to was the staircase built into the stage with the logo underneath it, which sounds like a small thing and absolutely wasn’t. It gave the whole set a centre of gravity and made every level change read from the back of the room.

Mark Tornillo‘s voice is by now a trademark of its own. Not too loud, not too soft, sitting exactly where it needs to across five decades of material that wasn’t originally written for him. “London Leatherboys” in London still does the job it was built to do. My only small reservation is that almost every movement on that stage looked studied rather than found. Each pose, each guitar lift, each walk to the edge appeared to be where it always is, night after night. Plenty of bands at this level work this way, and I understand why, but I’m not a fan of it. That said, when the encore rolled through “Fast as a Shark”, “Son of a Bitch”, “Balls to the Wall” and “Burning”, everyone lost it, right down to the very last drop.

Two bands, then, at opposite ends of the same story. One with everything still to prove and the lights literally against them, the other with fifty years behind them and every step measured out. What struck me walking out, past the last of the glitter heading for the tube, was that the room had been happy to give both of them what they came for.

Photo: Peterson Marti.