MAN WITH A MISSION at Manchester Academy 3, Manchester

It’s not every day you get to see rocking wolf-men in real life, but on what is an unusually warm February day in Manchester, MAN WITH A MISSION have just burst on to the stage at Manchester Academy. Kicking off with a well-known mix of throbbing guitars and electronic sounds Database has the crowd singing along right from the get go. It isn’t long until the band takes a quick pause to ask the crowd how they’re doing before jumping into 2045.

Being covered in fur can’t be easy jumping around under stage lights, but apart from the amusing MC breaks when Jean-Ken Johnny jokes about the tour being booked deliberately for the winter, there is no sign of discomfort in the performance. Continuing with the set, Raise Your Flag stands out as an early favourite with the crowd shouting along with Tokyo Tanaka’s vocal chorus.

About a third of the way through the evening and the stage empties apart from DJ Santa Monica and Spear Rib who stay on to keep the buzz alive by performing a unique take on the usual guitar battle by pitting drums against beats until Jean-Ken Johnny replaces the pair for a heartfelt message to the crowd about how the band started with a dream to tour the world, and he wanted to thank everyone for coming out with a special acoustic version of Chasing the Horizon — a truly unique experience for any fan to witness.

With everybody well-rested the whole band arrive back on stage and tear through the rest of the set in a heavy fashion as you’d expect from a band with so much energy, barely coming up for air and regularly encouraging crowd interactions with wolf claws and the good ol’ ‘everybody sit down and jump together for the chorus drop’. With the crowd getting more and more energised as the night goes on, an extensive set shows off a variety of songs from the band’s back catalogue before coming to an end with the heavy riffs of My Hero, each line from the chorus hitting harder than the last.

It would have been a great end to the evening; however, much to the delight of the crowd, the band returned one more time for an encore of Take Me Under and finally another classic room-pleaser Seven Deadly Sins. MAN WITH A MISSION say they dreamed about performing for a global audience, and we’re all glad they did — particularly expanding the tour out from the usual London dates. Manchester can’t wait for them to come back!

You can see MAN WITH A MISSION again in the UK at Download Festival 2019 alongside fellow J-rockers coldrain and CRYSTAL LAKE.

Set list

01. Database
02. Take What U Want
03. 2045
04. Broken people
05. Raise Your Flag
06. Break the Contradictions
07. Emotions
08. ~Drums&DJ Session~
09. Chasing the Horizon (Acoustic Version)
10. Hey Now
11. Get Off of My Way
12. Dead End in Tokyo
13. Long and Winding Road
14. Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana cover)
15. FLY AGAIN
16. My Hero

Encore
01. Take me under
02. Seven Deadly Sins