Gig review: Accept at Indigo, London

Live review: Accept at Indigo, O2, London on Friday, August 28 2026

OBJECTIVELY, the most interesting thing about tonight is the juxtaposition of the acts playing the 20,000-capacity O2 Arena and the 2800-capacity Indigo, which is inside the Dome structure.

At Indigo, we have German metal titans Accept, celebrating their 50th anniversary and an all-star best-off album. In the O2 is someone called Ariana Grande. Certainly, it’s not hard to tell on the Tube who’s going to what. I saw not a single set of butterfly wings and hotpants at Accept.

And Indigo – one of those modern venues where the stage is built along one of the long sides of the arena as opposed the traditional and less practical configuration where it’s at one of the shortest sides – is nowhere near capacity tonight. I’d estimate there’s room for a 1000 more people and it’s straightforward to walk up to the barrier on either extremity and go to the bar and pretty much come back and get your spot back.

Perhaps ticket prices for this level of act having doubled in the last 12 months has something to do with it. As for other peripheral matters, what’s with people in their fifties and sixties lining up single file at a the bar? Has anyone ever explain why a bar is shaped that way?

And also: the support band are great but then I read allegations of sexual impropriety against them so I decide to skip mentioning them here.

When Accept open with “Metal Heart”, my journalist’s nose for a narrative initially sparks by assessing the six men before me. Six-foot-87 guitarist Wolf Hoffmann is the only original member, singer Mark Tornillo has been in the band since 2009, drummer Christopher Williams and guitarist Philip Shouse are denizens of the scene in Nashville (where Hoffmann lives) and bassist Martin Motnik is a German who seems to have moved to Tennessee with the expressed intention of joining Accept.

For the first minute of the show, it’s possible to entertain the notion – shared over and over again these days on social media – that this is not “real”. You’ve got a chunk of the Gene Simmons Band (or the Ace Frehley Band, if you prefer) on stage, dressed in leather and studs, “pretending” to hard-bitten German head-bangers from the early eighties.

But only a minute.

In that first song, Hoffman stands on a monitor (or more likely just a platform placed there for this purpose) and plays his solo which samples Beethoven’s “Für Elise”, and you just can’t imagine Accept sounding better – with anyone. Is authenticity tied to the people of the performance? Is it worth sacrificing one for the other?

Because it’s a 50 year anniversary show we get a couple of medleys and recent material is thin on the ground, although “Pandemic” is considered striking enough to finish the main set. Personally I’d have liked to have heard at least “The Undertaker” as well.

The encore comprises the important proto-Thrash of “Fast As A Shark”, 1990’s “Son Of A Bitch” and the ubiquitous “Balls To The Wall” and 1981’s “Burning” replaces the intended closer, “I’m A Rebel” for a reason which is not at all clear.

This has been the best guitar tone I have heard at a gig all year, the riffs like thick stainless steel spikes that reach the back of your head and the pit of your gut, song after song. The authenticity narrative has been washed from my mind by a sonic power hose.

But it’s been replaced by another internal quandary: is Accept the band I like most who are undeniably metal? I think so. And I know this includes Metallica and Iron Maiden. But if you offered me tickets to all three once a year, I’d choose Accept each time. I just like their songs more.

As for why, if I was to describe them as “AC/DC in jackboots”, please take that as the purely music compliment it was intended to be – Ackadacka with a degree of teutonic harshness and angular rigour. A magnificent show and a … ahem … Grande evening out.