Red Hot Chili Peppers live

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Portman Road, Ipswich

Caroline Sullivan
Monday July 3, 2006
The Guardian



Masters of the morning-after song... Red Hot Chili Peppers.

"Ipswich? Where's Ipswich?" The question posed by singer Anthony Kiedis on the opening night of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' UK tour is perfectly reasonable. The Chili Peppers don't "tour"; they base themselves in one city and pay quick visits to stadiums elsewhere. This crowd is a typical cross-generational mix of metal teens, midlife couples and mini-fans who weren't born when the Chilis were drugging for America. So Kiedis's failure to register that he's in Ipswich Town FC's 30,000-seat ground shouldn't be taken personally.

Now in their 23rd year, the band are rehabbed and match-fit, the only evidence of the hedonistic past a range of lurid tattoos. Bassist Flea's entire body appears to be covered with them, but it turns out he's wearing a patterned adult-sized Babygro designed to match one owned by his newborn offspring. Its stretchiness proves handy, as the business of being Flea involves much writhing and leaping, as well as providing - with Chad Smith, the sequoia redwood of a drummer - the muscle-bound funk that thrusts things along.

The Chilis have amassed enough hits to keep the show going all that time with relatively little recourse to obscurities or filler from the current double album, Stadium Arcadium. It's not especially important that many of those hits are comprised of similar kerchunking John Frusciante guitar riffs and one recurring theme - their native City of Angels, depicted as a nightmarish metropolis of heroin, loneliness and sleaze. These considerations are meaningless set against the sound of stadium-sized choruses floating into the twilight sky.

Dani California and Californication, slotted in at the beginning and the end respectively, deliver West Coast melancholy to East Anglia. Shirtless and wearing this season's city shorts, Kiedis is a master of this kind of morning-after song - the supreme example, Under the Bridge (familiar to junior fans as an All Saints number), is illuminated by thousands of glowing mobiles as Kiedis croons: "My only friend is the city I live in, the City of Angels." Frusciante dominates the Arcadium tracks, Tell Me Baby and 21st Century. He certainly packs a lot of notes into a solo. But there's no self-indulgence on the set-closing By the Way and Give It Away, just four self-described "little guys" sounding like the biggest band in rock.

· At Madejski Stadium, Reading, tonight, then touring. Box office: 0870 534 4444.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006