It’s been… how about… never since I’ve been to a concert and felt so old. That much probably tells you quite a lot about the audience at Brixton Academy on Sunday night. American punk rockers Paramore, headed by the itsy bitsy Hayley played an energising set for their Riot tour and Saturday was their last in London. They certainly attracted many young people, many of them accompanied by chaperoning parents. The age difference really made no difference to me as we watched the upbeat sets of supporting act New Found Glory and Paramore’s main act.

Admittedly I hadn’t listened to their album as many time as I’m sure everyone around me had. Most of them seemed to know all of the words to all of their songs or, if not, made up for it by jumping around in quite a frenzy – something quite a feat on Brixton’s slanting floor. A lot of their music is just plain fun although the tiny punk rocker girl lead, the super fast beats and the atmosphere just kept leading me back to an image of a younger and more modern Avril Lavigne-like band, that I have to admit, is a little unfair on Paramore.

They do put on a pretty good show, and the energy of the entire band continued to feed the frenzied jumps of the people way up front. So many people got dragged out for crowd surfing and we even saw one guy literally pushed from way up front all the way out of the back by a couple of security guards, I guess for excessively disorderly conduct. Paramore played a decent set, performed two encore songs and it felt like everyone went away pretty happy.