We've heard a great deal this past week about "peak beard" – the saturation point beyond which the craze for male facial hair can only decline because its scarcity is no longer prized. You only need switch on BBC2's The Big Allotment Challenge (with its pair of hirsute hipster contestants) to verify how beardedness has not only peaked, but how its meaning has zigzagged out of control, thanks to Movember, Dalston's young fogeys, Hollywood and Paxman.
The photos of Elbow around the start of the campaign for The Take Off and Landing of Everything, the Mancunian band's sixth album – their first chart-topper – showed every single member of the band sporting some heavy foliage around the chop area (although this evening, drummer Richard Jupp seems clean-shaven for Elbow's tour-ending night at London's O2).
Elbow are emphatically not "peak beard", though. They are "recidivist beard". Theirs, it seems, is face-fur left to grow when the men in question became disinclined to shave, perhaps because they felt comfortable enough in their own skins to cease scraping them with steel. Elbow are "Guinness froth beard"; "avuncular beard".
None of these are bad ways to be bearded; all that moustache wax can get tiresome, after all. But Elbow's chin-chaff implies a certain level of ease, for good and ill. No one comes to an Elbow arena show expecting lasers: they expect to watch Guy Garvey radically shrink the venue with his warmth, like a human tumble dryer with good jokes and itchy kisses. "Internalise your monologue, Guy," he chides himself at one point, when the tangents threaten to overwhelm his between-song chats.
Similarly, Elbow's is less an "arena gig" than a gig in an arena by a band who know who they are. Sections of strings and brass up the sonic ante, while some nifty lamps drop down from the ceiling and become surprise beach balls at the end. There are no aerobatics, nor should there be. The band's journey to the "B" stage for an acoustic rendition of Great Expectations (on upright piano and acoustic guitar) consists of a gentle pootle down a short ramp.
Garvey, though, can't resist playing with his big new toy – us, the arena audience. He makes us do "a reverse split Mexican wave", a ripple that goes round the top tier, jumps down to the middle tier, then into the crowd who duck down, rather than wave. "I've licensed it to Chris Martin," he chuckles. In another show of confidence, Elbow's set is skewed towards the band's last three albums – the most recent Take Off… (March), Build a Rocket, Boys! (2011) and the Mercury-bagging Seldom Seen Kid (2008) – and correspondingly light on their first three.
In the O2, Elbow's cracking songs only sound more cracking, and their default songs – the mid-paced melancholic ones, where you might work up a ruminatory beard-stroke, perhaps – drag on a bit. This Blue World opens the gig, with refined strings and brass; later, the "real musicians", as Garvey refers to them, play a little interpolation of Gershwin's Summertime.
Then Charge arrives, full-blooded, replete with beery swagger, middle-aged rage and some fantastically brooding keyboards. Likewise, the first half of Fly Boy Blue/Lunette finds Garvey chanting intently, while stabs of brass increase the drama. This is peak new Elbow: unexpectedly sulky, subtle, but full of emphasis. Later, Grounds for Divorce will shake the place, sounding like a runaway Black Keys hit, and you wonder why Elbow bother with all the bleary sing-songs that sway gentle back and forth when they can write such great barnstormers and snakes in the grass. Tonight, The Birds is driving and raucous with an RSI-inducing keyboard flourish, rather than staid and subdued.
It's a moot point though. People flock to this band for succour; for a gruff embrace, for the pint held aloft. "We lost a friend last week," notes Garvey by way of introduction to The Night Will Always Win. The entire Seldom Seen Kid album remembers an absent friend, as does My Sad Captains, a touching song near the end of the set that becomes rheumy-eyed about setting the world to rights through the bottom of a glass. This is what Elbow do, not least in the obvious encore, One Day Like This: remove the bitterness from hurt and, goaded on by the strings, rise again.
