Live Review: Tyler Childers + The Magic Numbers + Omni of Halos, O2, London – 15th November 2025

Dressed in a blue sweater and brown Oxford bags, a short-haired and clean-shaven Tyler Childers may not look like the modern country music star. There’s no baseball hat, no obvious tattoos or jewellery and nothing to attract recognition if he was to take a walk around the lengthy O2 concourse, where many a male patron projected a look more in keeping with a Luke Combs or a Jelly Roll. Appearances can be deceptive, and when the 34-year-old Kentuckian took to the stage sharp at 9pm, he proceeded to take the house by storm as he demonstrated his songwriting skills, vocal abilities, and the warmth of his personality.

Playing acoustic and electric guitar and assisted by his long-time band The Food Stamps, Childers delivered a sensational set that ran well over two hours and gave the impression that he could have continued far into the night. Spoilt for choice from the many fine albums released since “Bottles And Bibles” in 2011, he chose 21 songs that covered love, poverty, addiction, church, hunting and revenge, the last of these in the humorous ‘Bitin’ List’.

As a child, Childers attended Baptist church with his family. He sang in the choir and had ample opportunity to study the preaching style of the minister. He put this to good effect when introducing the band or for the lengthier song introductions. Childers spoke about friendship and about how gratified he was to be playing here in London, England. He well remembered his first gig in the basement of The Slaughtered Lamb, a cosy room beneath a Clerkenwell pub where he played to about eight people.

Over the years, Childers has gravitated steadily upward at London venues, playing at the O2 Shepherds Bush Empire just before lockdown in January 2020, then Islington Assembly Rooms and Hammersmith Apollo, each time swelling his audience to tonight’s sold-out 20,000 arena. On the back of a US tour, it’s clear that his stagecraft has developed to fill the bigger spaces. An impressive video and light show brought the band to the stage before they launched into ‘Eatin’ Big Time’, the opening salvo from this year’s “Snipe Hunter”.

Energy levels were high, the impressive Craig Burletic catching the eye like a bass-wielding Angus Young. There was a foot-stomping ‘Dirty Ought Trill’ before things settled with ‘I Swear (To God)’ where the multi-instrumentalist Jesse Wells picked up the fiddle for the first time. Alongside him on guitar and pedal steel was James Barker, and these two provided fabulous solos throughout the evening, while bluegrass acoustic guitar maestro CJ Cain held down the rhythm. The Food Stamps’ line-up was completed by Matthew Rowland on piano, accordion and synthesiser, Rodney Elkins on drums and Kory Caudill on keyboards.

A section of love songs gave the crowd the opportunity to unleash their full-throated rendition of ‘All Your’n’. This was followed by ‘In Your Love’, a song which was Childers’ chance to express his support for gay rights in the official video, set in the 1950s and featuring two male coal miners. Kentucky is the home state of a vast number of country singers, including the coal miner’s daughter herself, Loretta Lynn. Childers’ father worked in the coal industry while his mother was a nurse, and when the singer moved to a separate stage mid-floor, the arena went quiet for the gritty ‘Nose on The Grindstone’ with its themes of Appalachian poverty and the opioid crisis.

After three songs there, and while Childers, Bain and Wells navigated the return route to the stage, Sunday service organ chords and a stained-glass window backdrop introduced a cover of T. Texas Tyler’s ‘The Old Country Church’. In good voice, Childers is clearly a loss to his old choir.

Wildlife featured in several songs, and the backdrop projections included deer, birds and huntsmen. ‘Down Under’ wasn’t the old Men At Work song but a sideways look at the Australian outback and its deadly “critturs”, while ‘Snipe Hunt’ referenced a joke about hunting a mythical bird. ‘Universal Sound’ was a beautiful existential reflection, but there was no ‘Feathered Indians’ as Childers stopped playing the song in March 2020. The show closed with ‘House Fire’, a pounding, rousing bluegrass ballad that captured the essence of Childers’ home state, banjo and fiddle duelling behind a plaintive and heartfelt vocal.

Two bands played in support; first, a Swedish act called Omni of Halos, favourites of Childers himself. Then came The Magic Numbers, a four-piece British band consisting of two pairs of brother and sister siblings, Romeo and Michele Stodart with Sean and Angela Gannon. Celebrating twenty years together and with a loyal fan base, many of those hearing them for the first time were left wondering why they had not come across this very fine band before.