The band’s 2015 stadium tour comes with bells and whistles; fireworks that shoot up into the air in front of the stage, gold streamers that cascade from the rafters, a raised platform that elevates the band to the height of the upper level, if only for a single song.
There’s a zigzag combo of giant screens across the back of the stage, where we get close-ups of the boys and an occasional parade of animation and graphics (a song about origins, Don’t Forget Where You Belong, has archival footage and references to their home towns.) A catwalk sends band members sauntering into the centre of the arena, bringing them closer to the audience members at the back.
But it’s an exuberant rather than an elaborate set-up, a backdrop for what One Direction does best: share a song between five voices. (Niall Horan plays guitar, but he’s the only member of the group who plays an instrument.)
The One Direction song universe is a mixture of the buoyant and the diffident, with numbers about longing for what you can’t have or hoping for what’s just out of reach.
Yet the girls they invoke don’t seem distant or obviously unattainable; they are mostly figures with whom the audience can readily identify. There are many references to what a girl wears: only Northanger Abbey’s Henry Tilney shows a keener interest in the details of a dress.
The show all runs together fairly seamlessly: a selection of songs from their four albums, heavily weighted towards the third album, Midnight Memories. There’s a single moment of awkward spontaneity, which presumably varies from night to night, when the musicians are invited to “improvise” for a minute or two: on this occasion, they break into the theme to The Flintstones.
One Direction members take it in turns to work the crowd, with a line of banter that’s very dependent on “how are you doing?” and “we couldn’t have done it without you”.
They remind us, a couple of times, that they’ve been together for almost five years now: five individual competitors from The X Factor who were combined into a single group and launched on a recording and touring juggernaut.
Zayn Malik has the purest voice, and the most low-key banter. Harry interacts most with the audience, wishing someone happy birthday and soliciting a joke from the crowd; he’s also the closest thing to a dancer in the group. Niall is the most cheerfully outgoing: he does a passable Oz accent, drapes himself in the Australian flag, talks about how much he loves Melbourne – it’s practically a citizenship application, or at least a bid for the keys to the city.
What’s your favourite song from the new album, 4, Niall asks us, before they launch into a number from it, the jauntily anthemic Girl Almighty.
But there were quite a few that we didn’t hear. This tour is in the wake of 4‘s release, so it’s a little surprising that they played only a handful of songs from it. About half the setlist is from Midnight Memories, which came out at the end of 2013. Surely there was room for a few more of the most recent songs – for the band’s sake, if nothing else.
One Direction plays Etihad Stadium on February 15, AAMI Stadium, Adelaide, on February 17 and Paterson’s Stadium, Perth, on February 20.
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