OK GO – Nottingham Rock City – 11th November 2026

No unicycles, treadmills or marching bands. Just great music and confetti. Lots of confetti.

Welcome to the 21st century

You’ll know OK GO for their videos. They fully exploited YouTube as an entertainment medium and created some truly memorable visual accompaniments for their music. If you haven’t seen them then welcome to the 21st century, go and check them out immediately.

The one problem that these remarkable visual artworks create is that they are so engaging, so addictively watchable, that they risk overshadowing the music. You might even enjoy watching four men dancing on treadmills so much that you can’t even remember the song. If so, you would be in good company with 1.2 million other channel subscribers.

Translating all of this to a live show at Nottingham’s Rock City is therefore no mean feat. It’s not a huge stage and the main floor is covered in people. No space here for pirouettes on weird little unicycles. The owners of the building would probably not appreciate tins of paint being thrown around. Surely, the music is going to have to stand on its own merits? Is it up to the task?

Thin triangle

The more pressing concern at the start of the evening is this: Who on Earth would be a worthy support artist for such a venture? Normally, the support for a show sets the scene, warms up the audience, fits with the main artist stylistically without treading on any toes. It’s hard to imagine an artist who would walk that thin line between compelling, banal and novelty. OK, that thin triangle, then.

Enter Michael Wilbur. He plays the saxophone. Think Kenny G, soothing your ears with his lilting soft rock middle of the road easy listening tunes. The kind of thing you would buy your Nan for Christmas. Then take that mental image of Kenny G and tear it up. Add big boots, torn shorts that look like a kilt, lots of black, an East Coast punk sensibility. Make the saxophone bigger. Much bigger. Add in a pounding techno backing track. You’ve never heard saxophone played like this. Suddenly, it all makes sense. Wilbur is absolutely the perfect opening act for OK GO. Surprising, a bit strange, unique, lots of fun and immensely engaging. A brilliant find.

Blizzard

The promotional poster for OK GO features a stage littered with confetti. Foreshadowing! Four men walk on to the stage to much delight from the crowd. Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Dan Konopka, and Andy Ross. They play regular musical instruments, for the most part. They look fairly normal in pale suits and stripey shirts. They seem nice.

The set opens with This Too Shall Pass. It’s hard not to refer to the songs by their videos – this is the one with the marching band. The confetti starts and hardly stops for the rest of the night. A blizzard, no less. It’s actually a pretty good song, once you stop marvelling at the choreography of the video and listen to the music. Anyone who has endured the dark night of the soul will relate to the lyrics.

Front man Damian Kulash punctuates the set with the occasional audience Q&A. He points out that most of the questions aren’t questions, they’re comments. Most of them seem to be “I was there!” and to be fair if you had one chance to address your hero, wouldn’t you say the same? Wouldn’t you want to celebrate a piece of shared history?

Surprise and delight

The opening trio concludes with Get Over It and I Won’t Let You Down. Kulash then showcases the new album with its gatefold sleeve and popup geometric thing. It’s absolutely what you would expect from this band. An album cover that surprises and delights.

Next we get, Take Me With You, Good Goodbye, White Knuckles, The Writing’s On The Wall.

Stage hands bring out a couple of large tables arranged with hand bells. Kulash hints at a shared British/American ideology – the rejection of conspiracy theories by anyone of above average intelligence. Of course this audience would agree – only smart people go to see live music. But what are the bells for? Well, the band learned to play them for a albumette of two songs; Return and the one that they play here, Shooting The Moon, a song about what it would be like to have to pretend that you’d been an astronaut. The song hints that it really would be easier just to go to the moon.

Quiet moment

Getting all these bells off stage again is a bit cumbersome, so Kulash helps out by climbing into the audience for a few minutes of distraction. Guitar in hand, he plays This Is How It Ends from the centre of the arena. A lovely, quieter moment to punctuate the sensory overload of the rest of the evening.

He starts the next song from his mid-crowd position with an odd little hand held synth which echoes the clattering of metal and jam jars from the video. Sorry, can’t help but think of it. Clambering back onto stage and we’re back to the full band for Needing/Getting.

More confetti

Obsession, Better Than This, Do What You Want, Oh Lately It’s So Quiet, Love, Upside Down & Inside Out, Here It Goes Again follow. The band leaves the stage. The audience screams. The band return.

In an apparent homage to British fans, we get Here She Goes by the La’s. A Stone Only Rolls Downhill and The One Moment complete the encore and the evening. More confetti than a Moonie wedding.

Elevated to the surreal

Well, a rally car didn’t screech across the stage. We didn’t become weightless. We didn’t see dancing robots or churning printers. What we got was a mighty fine mid-Atlantic rock concert, elevated slightly to the surreal.

The tour continues, but not for long. Well worth a night out.

OK GO: Website

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