'I'm a music writer - here's my favourite gig of 2024 and my predicted stand-out moment of 2025'

• It’s a new year and therefore a new bunch of concert tours about to arrive in the UK in 2025.
• That’s not counting the wave of artists already confirmed, or soon to be confirmed, for the UK summer festival season this year.
• We asked Music and Tickets writer Benjamin Jackson to reveal the best gig he saw in 2024, and what he’s looking forward to the most in 2025.

Hopefully by now you’ve slept off either the New Year’s Eve hangover or at the very worst the abundance of food that you consumed over the Christmas period.

Did you get anything nice for Christmas though? Maybe a brand new album you’ve been looking forward to for a while and needed a physical copy in your CD rack rather than just contend with streaming it on Spotify and the like?

Or perhaps you got a ticket to one of this year’s biggest events, with 2025 shaping up to be a huge year for concerts and tours. Could it be the biggest in years? That’s debatable, given that music is completely subjective.

But what was your favourite gig in 2024? While you’re mulling that question over, let me offer a second question - what are you looking forward to seeing the most in 2025 with the plethora of shows confirmed to be taking place?

While you’re making your list of what gigs you actually saw this year - and festival slots count as a performance, if that helps - how about I share one of my favourite shows of 2024, where phones were banned and it felt like I was at a Pink Floyd concert?

The best gig I went to in 2024 was…

Tool. Hands down - no question. I would go as far as to say, to paraphrase John Cusack in High Fidelity, that it was one of my top five best shows I’ve been to ever, including some wild festival experiences over the years.

The eagerly-anticipated return of the group to the UK kicked off in Birmingham on May 30, and I was fortunate enough with my wife to go see the band on the second show of their UK tour at the AO Arena in Manchester. The weather was great that day I recall - I was sweating bullets walking from the train station to our accommodation, though admittedly I’m not the healthiest of specimens.

As fans of Tool will attest to, the merchandise stand was almost an art gallery unto itself; the incredible images printed on shirts featuring at times the world of long-time collaborator Alex Grey and "lenticular" posters that priced from £50 all the way up to £300 for a signed version. Though we picked up some shirts, the full blown “art-piece” was a little out of the price range if we planned on having some beverages during the show.

One of the best things about the show though was the “no mobile phone” policy that the band had instituted. Lead singer Maynard James Keenan riffed earlier on in their set to “forget about that s**t” and just enjoy the performance the band were offering rather than enjoying it through a lens. Though, we all got our opportunity to record a song at the end of their set, thus proving we were there.

That element just seemed to bring all of us congregated at the show to let loose a little; not a full blown “hippy happening,” but in an era where even just dancing like you don’t care who is watching can elicit attention online because “someone” thought it was funny, sometimes self-awareness kicks in. Not on this occasion.

I saw middle aged people (I’m now in the age bracket) just letting go, standing up, “feeling” the music and really just tapping into the energy that Tool were emitting from the stage. No one felt self-conscious letting loose to the band.

It was hard not to let loose either, as the show was a full blown audio/visual spectacular sat down watching the group make their way through, Fear Inoculum, with psychedelic video footage casting the group in the shadows of the otherworldly images presented, with laser beams dancing across the AO Arena and its inhabitants one June evening.

Then, the final song of the night, Keenan said we could get our phones out - queue an armada of arms lifted high into the thick air in the Manchester area, as everyone “had” to at least show some form of photographic or video evidence that we were there. Cue one of the band’s biggest hits, ‘Ænema,’ and then to a chorus of ‘Dancing Queen’ over the AO Arena’s PA, that was Tool.

Incredible; I could imagine back in “the day” that big fans of Pink Floyd might have felt the same way listening to that progressive band perform and turning a concert into something “bigger.” Though maybe I’m still recovering from the Kool-Aid after all these months.

But it was a show that is forever etched into my mind; a show that I can easily pull memories and recall moments from and, after all, aren’t those the hallmarks of an incredibly memorable gig?

Set list: Tool at the AO Arena, Manchester - June 1 2024

Credit: Setlist.FM

• Jambi
• Fear Inoculum
• Rosetta Stoned (With Lost Keys intro)
• Pneuma
• Sweat
• Descending (With extended lyrics)
• The Grudge
• Chocolate Chip Trip
• Flood (With confetti)
• Invincible
• (-) Ions
• Ænema (Tour debut)

The show I am looking forward to the most in 2025 is…

Is it a cop out answer to say a festival set in 2025 rather than a gig itself?

Though next year is full of huge tours taking place, be it Sabrina Carpenter (whose ticket I ultimately had to sell to afford Christmas 2024), Billie Eilish and the huge Oasis reunion, those of you who have followed my scribblings over the past year will know how much of a fan of Chappell Roan I have become.

Roan has been booked as one of the headliners for Leeds and Reading 2025, alongside Travis Scott, Hozier and Bring Me The Horizon and in doing so has made history in the process; her debut performance at this year’s event marks the first time a debuting musician is headlining the festival, so I’ve been told.

It demonstrates not only that pop music throughout 2024 was overshadowing its guitar-based counterparts in terms of fervent excitement for releases or tour dates but also the breath of fresh air that the music industry sometimes needs.

Do you not tire of the cookie cutter interviews on the red carpets that some celebrities undertake, shuffled in front of the baying paparazzi cameras like cattle at the cattle market? So when someone who is perhaps “unaccustomed” to the level of fame they’ve reached is calling out terrible behaviour on the red carpet, are you not entertained?

Roan also drew a line in the sand when it came to how newer bandwagon jumpers were crossing some personal lines regarding what it deemed appropriate may have elicited some snarky comments, but should we not be respecting the personal boundaries - do unto others and the like?

I called her a “punk” and I stand by that; she’s every bit counter-cultural when it comes to the norms or “tropes” of being a pop star. But away from that, her music slaps… sorry… her music is “well good.”

The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, despite what Spotify Wrapped said on the contrary, was one of those albums I constantly found myself gravitating to; it was a pop album I had on repeat a number of times which I haven’t found myself doing much. Not since the release of Lorde’s Pure Heroine in 2013 or Billie Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in 2019. Or Brat earlier this year.

But from a cultural touchstone standpoint also, seeing Chappell Roan make history at Leeds and Reading 2025 is something I think could be pretty important not just for us the audience, but for Roan too - we are witnessing pop music overtaking guitar music once again in terms of mainstream popularity, though the Oasis reunion shows will no doubt bring a Britpop reckoning in terms of influence newer bands with it.

But I stand by Chappell.

What was your favourite show that you attended in 2024, and what are you looking forward to coming up in 2025? Share your thoughts, predictions or your albums of the last 12 months by leaving a comment down below.