OneRepublic live in Birmingham: confetti pop!
- Aleksandra Hogg
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Utilita Arena, Birmingham – 20 September 2025
IMAGES ALEKSANDRA HELENA HOGG / WORDS HARRY K
There’s a particular smell at an arena pop gig: part overpriced lager, part anticipation, part industrial-strength dry ice. On Saturday night, Birmingham’s Utilita Arena smelt of all three as OneRepublic parked their Escape to Europe 2025 juggernaut in town.
Ella Henderson: the warm-up act you actually want to watch
Credit where it’s due: Ella Henderson’s support slot wasn’t just polite background noise while people found their seats. She strode out like a woman who knows half the crowd once voted for her on The X Factor and the other half has screamed her choruses at a festival beer tent. “Ghost” had the place singing like it was already the headliner.
Then came OneRepublic, fronted by Ryan Tedder — songwriter to the stars, man behind roughly half the choruses you’ve hummed in a supermarket
They kicked off with Born and Feel Again, a one-two punch that sounded like they’d been engineered in a lab to soundtrack a Netflix coming-of-age montage. From there it was a conveyor belt of hits (Kids, Good Life, Secrets), each one so slick you could practically hear the sync deals being signed.
To their credit, Tedder and co. weren’t shy about flexing their industry Rolodex: covers of Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love (which Tedder co-wrote) and Beyoncé’s Halo turned the arena into the world’s most polished karaoke night. Impressive? Definitely.
Because it’s 2025 and no arena gig is complete without “a moment,” we got the full spectacle: acoustic intros, mass singalongs, and a biblical amount of confetti. Stop and Stare was belted back at the band by thousands, while Something I Need closed the night in suitably triumphant style.
The downside? newer tracks like Artificial Paradise and Singapore didn’t quite land with the same oomph, OneRepublic aren’t here to surprise you; they’re here to give you exactly what you expected, wrapped in LED screens and confetti cannons.
Let’s be clear: if you came looking for grit, danger or rock-and-roll chaos, you were in the wrong postcode. But as a two-hour crash course in why Ryan Tedder has basically written the soundtrack to the last 15 years of pop radio? Birmingham got its money’s worth.
It was heartfelt, it was slick, and it was just ironic enough when Tedder sang Beyoncé. Four stars for the spectacle, one deducted for playing it safe.
SET LIST
Born
(Intro)
Feel Again
Kids
Good Life
RUNAWAY
Singapore
Secrets
Rescue Me
Run
Stop and Stare
Artificial Paradise
B Stage
Bleeding Love
(Leona Lewis cover)
Halo
(Beyoncé cover)
Future Looks Good
Something I Need
Main Stage
West Coast
Lose Somebody
(Kygo cover)
Apologize
Can't Stop
Let's Hurt Tonight
Sunshine
I Ain't Worried
Love Runs Out
I Lived
Counting Stars
I Don't Wanna Wait / Calling (Lose My Mind) / If I Lose Myself
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