Del Water Gap pronounced himself “perhaps the biggest fan in this room” of Niall Horan on Wednesday night, as he opened for the One Direction member at the Pine Knob Music Theatre.
Many of the 15,000 at the show may have begged to differ, however.
Pine Knob was a Horan horde haven on Wednesday. Fans had purchased their tickets a year ago. The multi-generational throng (lots of parents, or original One Direction fans) braved the day’s debilitating rain and a particularly soggy Pine Knob lawn. And not long after the doors opened they were on track to set a new souvenir sales record for the venues.
They were also rabid after a six-year wait to see Horan, who last visited during the summer of 2018 at the then-DTE Energy Music Theatre. He acknowledged that early in the show. “It’s been a long time, so we have to make up for a lot of lost time tonight” the 30-year-old Irish-born singer, sporting a brown vest, sleeveless undershirt and khaki pants, said just before performing “The Show,” the title track from his third solo album which also gave the tour its title.
Horan also spoke about having “a lot of good memories here,” referring to both Pine Knob and to “the stadium” — Ford Field, where One Direction performed three times during the mid-2010s. “Sing, dance, laugh, cry — do whatever you’ve got to do tonight,” he instructed. “Just don’t get arrested.”
The Horan heads (go with us on that one) did all of that over the course of his 95-minute, 20-song show, which drew from all three of his albums and made one nod to One Direction with its 2014 favorite “Stockholm Syndrome.” It was all sincere and mostly joyful, delivered with just enough visual pizazz and muscular performances from his six-piece band. Horan hasn’t quite reached the commercial heights of his One Direction groupmate Harry Styles, but he’s assembled his own solid body of work whose various approaches — from the la-la pop of “Must Be Love” to the Coldplay-style pop of “Mirrors” and the dance club-leaning “Meltdown” — played well over the course of the evening.
Horan and his band opened with “Nice to Meet Ya” and slipped a bit of Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” into the next song, “Small Talk,” while much of the show was informed by the smoothly melodic vibe of “The Show” album, which has been compared, favorably, to California’s Laurel Canyon scene of the early 70s. The show worked when Horan — who played guitar most of the night and piano on a couple of songs — stripped it down, too, with a mellow three-song mid-show mini-set that included renditions of “Paper Houses” and “This Town” with just three of the band members and a solo acoustic version of “You Could Start a Cult” before bringing the band back for the anthemic “Heaven.”
During Horan’s ritual sign-reading segment, meanwhile, he wished one fan happy birthday and congratulated another on passing her driver’s exam. when another’s message asked for a photo with him, he asked her to “come on down” and told the rest of the crowd, “Shut up! I can smell jealousy!”
He brought things to a close with the gentle “Still” and an encore of a particularly appropriate “Heartbreak Weather” and “Slow Hands.” “Let’s make sure it’s not six years before we do this again,” he said before the latter — and Horan was certainly not alone in that sentiment.
