Messed!Up
Growing up in Sweden and being a huge music fan, there wasn’t many options if you wanted to go to a summer festival. Basically, there was one big music festival back in the 1990s, called the Hultsfred Festival. The festival gave smaller Swedish a unique chance to play smaller slots before big international bands, and heaps of Swedish bands turned that opportunity into international fame and glory, also known as the Swedish music wonder.
One of those bands that played their first big slots was The Hives, and from that first time I saw five young dudes, barely 20 years old, at the Hultsfred Festival in 1998, I knew they would have an international career because they had the charisma needed. However, I’d never expect their huge international success, and seeing the band play sold out arenas today makes me happy because I was there at the very start and watched the bands at heaps of small underground clubs. And I’ve learned something over the years: Few bands can weaponize chaos with as much precision as The Hives, and last night’s show at Sporthalle in Hamburg was a full-throttle reminder that the Swedish garage rock legends are still unmatched when it comes to explosive live performances.
As soon as the lights dim out, the band walks on stage with a backdrop of huge balloons spelling out ‘HIVES’ in capital letters, and then they kick off with latest album opener ‘Enough Is Enough’. Already from the outset you’ll understand that The Hives don’t play their songs so much as detonating them. In the following song ‘Walk Idiot Walk’, Sporthalle erupts in a frenzy of clapping and shouting, and when their play the first of their classics, ‘Main Offender’, it hits like a fistful of firecrackers, guitars slicing through the room while drummer Chris Dangerous punishes his kit like he was up for a title game for the WBA belt. And Arson? He spent half the show airborne, the other half hanging dangerously off the edge of amps staring at people while playing some killer riffs. It’s chaos and it’s beautiful. Cables flying, mic stands being drop-kicked, Pelle repeatedly sprinting offstage into the crowd – a German crowd can get a better Wednesday night!
About that; Howlin Pelle turned Wednesday into Saturday while he paced the stage like a charismatic ringmaster, delivering monologues that oscillated between deadpan arrogance and absurd comedy, especially repeating ‘I never remembered telling you to stop clapping your hands’ or ‘You are currently witnessing the best band in the world and we can do whatever we want because we are rich rockstars’. Or at the beginning of the show when Pelle told the crowd that he had seen 90 minutes into the future, and he saw people leaving the show very happy. The real trick is to sound cocky and come off as a comedian at the same time.
I also like that they keep focused on their new album and try to squeeze the new songs into memorable pieces in people’s heads. Too many bands miss out the opportunity or are too afraid, but if you want the new material to turn into classics you have to risk something, right? But we also get an overload of the songs we always want to hear; ‘Hate to Say I Told You So’, ‘Come On!’, and ‘Tick Tick Boom’ all played before the encore. The even helped people out with the encore; Pelle got people fired up and made us scream ‘Zugabe’ so the band could turnaround in the door and get back onstage and play the last three songs – ‘Legalize Living’, ‘Bigger Hole to Fill’, and ‘The Hives Forever Forever The Hives’.
The Hives delivered exactly what only The Hives can: a riotous, swaggering, laugh-out-loud, high-octane spectacle. Yes I am a Swede and you may think I’m biased when I say that this was by far the best gig I’ve been to in 2025, but I’m not a huge The Hives listener – I own own album! But I have been to eleven The Hives gigs over the years because I always leave happy and wake up the next with an amazing feeling.
Never ever miss The Hives live!
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Photographer: Niko Schmuck
