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You know who Sophie Lloyd is. Even if you've never heard her name before, you're a metalhead on the internet. That means at one point or another you've seen her on Youtube, shredding virtuoso versions of classic rock hits from Sultans Of Swing to Stairway To Heaven.
Sophie's viral fame (she has 1.19 million subscribers) has opened multiple doors for her. From a bedroom player in Britain, she's become the live guitarist for rap star Machine Gun Kelly. Plus, she's launched a career making original music, last year's debut album Imposter Syndrome getting vocalists from Trivium, Halestorm and more to sing over her blazing solos.
Tonight's show at London's 500-capacity Underworld is Sophie's first-ever as a solo star, and it unsurprisingly sold out in moments. It starts promisingly enough as well, the guitarist taking the stage with her backing band and opening with two of her earliest originals, Battleground and Bulletproof Revolver. She proves endearing between songs as well, humbly and giddily talking with a crammed-in crowd.
That fever pitch swiftly sags, though. Sophie is joined onstage by her first singer, a geezer called Gaz. He leads the instrumentalists through a series of Imposter Syndrome songs, faring decently given how many different voices were on the thing. Yet that's seemingly not what the turnout tonight is for; many of the attendees arrived in shirts dedicated to AC/DC, Iron Maiden and other old school superstars, and any appetite for the covers that made Sophie a sensation goes almost entirely unfed. Across 80 minutes, fans get just three reinterpretations from yesteryear: Enter Sandman and Thunderstruck back-to-back, then, later, a seemingly improvised shred with a Super Mario Bros motif in it.
The evening's second and final singer is Marisa Rodriguez, of hard rockers Marisa And The Moths. More originals follow, and by the time Sophie et al have been onstage for an hour, the audience has visibly thinned. The last cover of the night is a take on Machine Gun Kelly's I Think I'm Okay. As a pop punk track played to a room of hard rock diehards, Marisa's announcement of it begets cheers from only two people.
Sophie Lloyd is a top tier guitarist, and it'd be ludicrous to argue otherwise. However, what she played tonight was a little at odds with what she's known for, the rock and metal classics that have populated her channel for years barely present. This time, what could have been a nostalgic party at times perhaps felt just a little too perfunctory.