BIGBANG are back, and after fourteen years, back in London

Credits: Zutter.co.uk Photographer: Daily Matcha

BIGBANG's 20th anniversary tour, XX: COSMOS, reached Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Saturday 26 September, a week after Paris and fourteen years after the group last played London, at Wembley Arena in December 2012. It was their first London show as a trio, on their first tour since 2017, and for London VIPs it was the home date, the one they had all been impatiently waiting for since the tour was announced in June.

Zutter team was in the stadium for it, and the short version is this: BIGBANG are back, with an official comeback, and they are back in London.

Back in London

The last time BIGBANG were here, the first Wembley night sold out in under two hours and a second had to be added. A year before that, in Belfast, they beat Britney Spears to the MTV EMA for Best Worldwide Act, the first EMA a Korean act had ever won. By 2016 Forbes reckoned they had earned $44m (£33.2m) in a year, enough to make them the first K-pop act on its Celebrity 100.

So when phrases like "the Kings of K-pop" or "the idols' idols" are used to describe them, nobody who attended the Tottenham concert is going to argue, because for a lot of people that is exactly what they are.

That is not just a figure of speech, either. Suga of BTS once told Taeyang that "it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that BIGBANG practically made BTS", and all seven members of BTS have named BIGBANG as a role model. Over at BLACKPINK, who came up through the same label, Lisa has said she was a BIGBANG fan before she ever moved to Korea, and that the first album she bought was a Taeyang solo record. She went on to dance in G-Dragon and Taeyang's 'Good Boy' video and, in 2023, to feature on Taeyang's 'Shoong!'.

Daesung math

It took eight years and eight months to get from BIGBANG's last concert in Seoul to the opening night of this tour in Goyang in August, and if you think that is just a number, you have not been keeping up with the maths.

On this tour Daesung has been working it out on stage, with the seriousness of a man cracking a conspiracy. 'BiiiG' arrived four years and four months after 'Still Life': four plus four, eight. Eight years and eight months between concerts: 88. G-Dragon and Taeyang were both born in 1988. BIGBANG debuted on 19 August, 8.19, twenty years ago this summer, and eight plus one is nine, which brings you to Daesung, born in 1989. Fate, clearly. Fans have taken to calling it "Daesung math", after the "boy math" trend, and honestly, the numbers check out.

It all feeds a promise the group has been making since Goyang: to keep performing pal-pal, which is how you say 88 in Korean and also means full of life, until they are 88 years old.

Credits: Zutter.co.uk Photographer: Daily Matcha

Seven means seven

The show started at 7pm, and a lot of the stadium, had planned for eight, the way Paris had gone a week earlier, and the way Daesung math works, with eight as the magic number. Either way, the first three songs were played to a stadium still filling up: through 'Hands Up' and 'Tonight', people kept trickling in to their seats.

The event information on some tickets may have been partly to blame, as it only gave doors opening at 4.30pm, not the start time. If you are catching XX: COSMOS somewhere else, from Taipei to Kaohsiung, take the lesson London learned the hard way: check the start time, then check it again. Don't just go along with Daesung math theories.

Half concert, half stand-up

What the audience did not expect was how funny it would be. Every break in the singing turned into a bit, and the banter between the three of them never really stopped. At times it felt as much like a stand-up show as a concert, one where the comedians happened to have 32 songs to get through.

Taeyang came with material. He tried out his best English accent ("I need some wa'er"), called Daesung "mate", and built a whole running joke around one word: gentleman. He drank his water "like a gentleman". He decided the crowd was too mild, which he put down to us being in the land of the "gentle". And when part of the stadium started screaming "take it off", he informed them that he could not take off his pants, because that is not the gentleman way. In a city where pants mean something else entirely, that line works on two levels.

He also told London it was the best crowd of the tour, to which G-Dragon later replied, teasing the audience: "I don't think so."

Credits: Zutter.co.uk Photographer: Daily Matcha

BB, G, T, Daesungie

G-Dragon got one of the best laughs of the night without trying. Chatting through one break, he went to sing the 'BiiiG' lyric and lost track of the letters halfway: "GD, T, oh no, BB”, then, turning to Daesung, "I am G, you are D", then again from the top "BB, G, T, Daesungie", and again, catching himself, "you are not D, you are Daesungie". The two of them fell about laughing at getting it wrong.

Daesung had a tribute of his own to make. In his solo section he led the stadium through his version of Freddie Mercury's call-and-response, which got sillier and more operatic with every round, before dedicating the moment to Mercury as his inspiration. In a London stadium, of all places.

Haru Haru, audience version

And then the moment everyone there will hold dear for a long time. During 'Haru Haru' the whole stadium took over the singing, and the three of them stood and listened, smiling like proud dads at a school concert.

At the start of 'Lies', G-Dragon heard the official fan chant coming from his side of the stage and started blushing and giggling, delighted, as if he had not heard it a thousand times before.

London got one song more than Paris, too. The set ran to 32, against the 31 we counted at the Stade de France, over almost three hours, and the encore alone went on for nearly half an hour with 'Flower Road' in it.

Credits: Zutter.co.uk Photographer: Daily Matcha

The people who built the cosmos

Under all the jokes is a team that deserves its own curtain call. BIGBANG have a long habit of hiring from the very top of Western stadium pop: on their first world tour in 2012, the creative director was Laurieann Gibson, who had staged Lady Gaga's Monster Ball tour. This time the stage is by Es Devlin, and that matters for London in particular: Devlin is a London designer, and the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics was hers.

Devlin has a Tony and three Olivier awards, has built stages for Beyoncé, The Weeknd and U2, and designed the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show. For XX: COSMOS her centrepiece is a 23-tonne LED structure that moves during the show and runs on multi-motor torque synchronisation, which is exactly as complicated as it sounds.

The director is Mike Carson, the co-creative director and co-production designer of Kendrick Lamar's 2025 Super Bowl halftime show. He also co-designed Lamar and SZA's Grand National stadium tour, so stadiums are not new to him.

BIGBANG worked on the setlist, stage design and staging themselves. The music is live, led by Wow Jones, a Baltimore-born producer whose credits include Usher, Post Malone and Rihanna.

Meet the Bangers

The twenty-strong crew that works as BIGBANG's backup dancers and choreographers has a new name: Bangers. Two of the faces on that stage go back a very long way: Dony and Deukie, the twins Kwon Young-don and Kwon Young-deuk, spent 16 years together as dancers and choreographers at YG.

Which makes the twins the right people to explain something every VIP at Tottenham already knows: BIGBANG never dance in sync. On Daesung's YouTube show in 2024, they rated G-Dragon the better freestyler and Taeyang the one who follows choreography best, and explained that BIGBANG's performances were never built like typical idol synchronised dances. They teased Daesung about the level of BIGBANG's choreography, then admitted that if the group had performed that way and it looked awkward, "they wouldn't have become BIGBANG". So the dancers are in sync, and BIGBANG are not. That is the design.

Was it the perfect 20th anniversary show BIGBANG could have given UK VIPs? We want to hear from you.

Fourteen years is a long time to wait for a band to come back to your city, and London waited. Next time, London will be in their seats by seven.

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