All the clichés apply: you can go home again, home is where the heart is, and, most importantly go big or go home. Twenty One Pilots did all those things on a crisp Saturday night (Oct. 17) in their hometown of Columbus, Ohio at a triumphant, career-highlight show that pulled out all the stops to cap their two-year-long Clancy tour.
There was a drone show, pyro galore, a three-hour set list (their longest ever), a cameo from the home team’s drum corps and, almost, a few tears from singer/pianist Tyler Joseph and stalwart drummer Josh Dun when they took a moment near the end of the night to take in the gravity of the situation. The group that started out playing a 300-capacity club called The Basement across town had a 33,900% blowup to the city’s largest venue, packing The Ohio State University’s football stadium (The Shoe) with more than 100,000 fans from all over the city, the country and the world converging for an epic night spanning their catalog and the many chapters of their multi-chapter Trench saga.
The culmination of a year of playing stadiums, Saturday’s show flooded a city already swathed in red on any given Saturday with a sea of Clikkies (the familiar nomenclature of the Clique fan group name), who set up a Bandito fan camp outside the stadium where they traded memorabilia, helped each other prep their looks for the night and shared intel on all the spots in town associated with the duo, who evince a cult-like following among their devoted followers.
Everywhere you looked in Columbus there was evidence of Clique activity, from the signature red and yellow strips of tape applied to carefully curated outfits alluding to group lore, to the thousands of devotees with their throats and hands painted dun black and a massive conclave of ominous red robed “Bishops” floating past bars and restaurants typically packed with red-wrapped Buckeyes fans.
All the hype and anticipation culminated in a three-hour spectacle that packed in all the things fans have come to expect from the dynamic duo, plus a few surprises that lit up the sky, and 100,000 hearts, as Joseph and Dun humbly thanked their diehards for taking them from the basement to the big show (or Shoe).
Check out our 12 top moments from Saturday’s show.
