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The Eden Project turned into a sea of red, yellow, green and blue as JLS took to the stage to close out a phenomenal summer season of Eden Sessions on Saturday, 13th July 2024.
The week’s wind and rain cleared to leave St Austell bathed in sun, providing the perfect setting for the last Eden Session of 2024.
It was the eighth stop on the JLS Summer Hits Tour, which has seen the boy-band perform at iconic venues from Warwick Castle to Scarborough Open Air Theatre and finally down south to Cornwall for their debut performance at The Eden Sessions.
‘East side geezer’ Tinchy Stryder opened the evening, warming up the crowd for a night of 00’s nostalgia with his hit tracks ‘Number 1’ and ‘Never Leave You’. The 36-year-old released his debut studio album – ‘Star in the Hood’ – just two years before JLS burst on to the scene and made for the perfect opening act.
Then, as the sun set over the iconic Biomes, it was time for the main event. With a career spanning almost two decades, including five number one singles, it was no surprise to hear the rapturous cheers and screams from the crowd as Aston Merrygold, Marvin Humes, JB Gill and Oritsé Williams walked out on stage in turn, immediately jumping into their instantly recognizable tune, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’.
It may have been 16 years since we first saw them on our screens as fresh faced 20-year-olds on The X Factor but they proved they were still an incredibly well-oiled machine, entertaining the six-thousand-strong crowd with expertly choreographed dance routines and beautiful harmonies.
Their musical tenure worked to their advantage on the night, with the crowd knowing every word to their repertoire, from ‘Hottest Girl in the World’, ‘So Many Girls’ and ‘Love You More’. So much so, that Marvin Humes exclaimed ‘wow, Cornwall! You really understood the assignment tonight’ and agreed with his bandmates that this was by far the loudest crowd of the whole tour, which was no surprise, as a majority of the audience were seeing the band for the very first time.
With a nod to their hiatus between 2013 and 2020, they spoke to the crowd about their ‘extracurricular activities’, from JB Gill’s farming-ventures to Marvin’s DJ sets, which made their way to another iconic Cornish venue, The Watering Hole in Perranporth.
Putting their DJ skills to good use, they announced ‘DJLS’: a battle that saw Aston and JB team up against Marvin and Oritsé to see who spun the best tunes. They begun by playing and singing snippets from their discography like ‘Close to You’ and their cover of Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ before moving into some more top 00s tracks.
They got the crowd dancing to Nicki Minaj’s ‘Superbass’, Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’ and a nod to the then-upcoming Euro 2024 final with ‘Three Lions’ by The Lightning Seeds, who performed on the very same stage just two weeks earlier.
The boys opened up, talking about Marvin’s time down-under in ‘I’m a Celebrity’ and the bromance he struck up with British television presenter, Sam Thompson. The crowd went wild as they teased bringing Sam up on stage but sadly the honorary fifth member of JLS was not in the Duchy. The crowd was rewarded though as they jumped into ‘She Makes Me Wanna’, with the whole audience doing the accompanying dance that Marvin famously taught Sam in the jungle.
Congratulations were also in order as one of their songs, ‘Beat Again’, turned 15-years-old that day. The track is their best seller throughout their whole career, exceeding 600,000 sales and had everyone singing and dancing along to every single word.
After calls for an encore and ‘one more song!’, the boys came out to close the show, playing top hits ‘Love You More’ and perhaps their most iconic tune ‘Everybody In Love’. ‘You didn’t think we’d forget this one, did you,’ said Marvin as the instrumentals started up behind them. They ended the show with the iconic harmony to ‘JLS, forever, and ever’ as the audience burst into applause.
All in all, JLS proved that they have definitely still got ‘it’, with their excellent harmonies and iconic 00s dance moves transporting everyone in that crowd back to their teenage years.
Many in the audience had been JLS supporters since childhood, with superfan Sophie telling CHAOS Radio that the merchandise she was wearing was bought for her “when I was 8-years-old”.
It was also many people’s first Eden Session ever, like Love Island’s Lucie Donlan and Luke Mabbott, who were working with one of the main sponsors, Pukka Tea, praising the venue, saying: “It’s such a good set up… it’s so picturesque and the organisation has made everything so easy as well”.
This gig rounds off yet another impressive set of Eden Sessions that included:
• Suede and Manic Street Preachers
To keep up-to date with the latest Eden Sessions news, visit www.edensessions.com
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