It starts with someone in the stalls waving a crutch in the air. It ends with tiers of velvet-lined swivel seating quaking as Kano rewinds 3 Wheel Ups, a tune from 2016 in which he boasts that DJs rewind his songs that often because he’s so good. Each reload whips the crowd into stiffer peaks and rattles the seating harder. At one point before the encore, two sousaphone players stage a battle, honking out the hooks of grime classics one after the other, the crowd picking the winner. It is impossible to leave this landmark gig without a wide grin and plenty to mull over.
As a genre, grime has hit any number of conventional milestones in recent years. Stormzy has headlined Glastonbury, Skepta and Dave have won Mercury prizes and Wiley has been given an MBE, to name a few – but there is still something deeply symbolic in this east London takeover of the seat of the British musical establishment. It’s not an absolute first: BBC 1Xtra staged a grime prom in 2015, and the venue has latterly made space for Afrobeats and drum’n’bass. But tickets for the final date on Kano’s current UK tour sold out in minutes and even if the Albert Hall’s outreach programme meant they were reasonably priced, this gig is really the result of two-way rapprochement in which a former Cinderella genre, actively persecuted by police for a decade, comes of age. It would be unfair to rob Kano of his menace and immediacy by saying he is a mature artist, but there is a logic to Kane Robinson being the grime artist on this stage.
At 34, Robinson is now a wiser elder statesman, still immersed in the culture, but able to see the bigger picture, musically and sociologically. He is a quiet sort of star, who tends to avoid the outward trappings of his success. Thanks to his starring role as Sully on the recently revived Top Boy, a hit that topped Netflix’s most recent UK Top 10, he also has considerable star power at his disposal, but he is alive to the complications his work throws up. In interviews, Robinson has noted how this season of Top Boy has sought to deglorify the on-screen violence more than previously. Sully’s character, previously a hard nut, has gained a dimension or two.
Crucially, Kano’s own musical oeuvre has ranged far from the tinny, dystopian urgency of grime’s early productions, becoming more nimble and musical by the album. His latest – Hoodies All Summer, released two months ago – may be a stark state-of-the-nation address to young postcode warriors clashing bloodily over benighted bits of turf. But it is also a beautifully wrought work, elegantly produced and dappled with light and shade, humour and cinematic uses of sound.
Tonight, Kano takes full advantage of the Albert Hall’s hallowed acoustics to bring Hoodies into 3D. Because this works deserves it, he deploys a four-piece band, a gospel choir, a horn section and, towards the end, a small army of steel pan players, the Metronomes Steel Orchestra.
It’s like church: everyone bar the guest MCs is wearing white and the gospel singers stamp their mellifluous authority on a number of songs. It’s like carnival, too: the horns are mobile and wander about the stage, while a few steel pan players shimmy to the fore. The steady backbeat of Jamaican culture, and the sound systems that gave birth to the original 00s garage and grime crews, are all deeply entrenched in Kano’s offering, audibly on Caribbean-leaning tracks such as Can’t Hold We Down.
Although this gig is a celebration of how far Kano has come in six albums, and a testament to how nuanced his iteration of grime can be, the raw materials here remain true to source. Kano has always rhymed hard and fast, even for a musical form full of fraught bpms and mercurial spitting. Neither maturity, nor changing fashions in flows, have dimmed his reference-packed delivery.
His control is foregrounded from the off, on opening track Free Years Later – a reference to the time elapsed since 2016’s Made in the Manor, Kano’s account of his Newham upbringing. It’s the first of three songs from Hoodies All Summer, all themed around the senseless black-on-black violence besieging communities already laid low by endemic deprivation and racism.
“Black tie/ Trouser crease/Another funeral/ Another rest in peace,” he accuses in a disgusted staccato on Good Youtes Walk Amongst Evil, “welcome to my city.”
Trouble, meanwhile, is the new album’s moving centrepiece, in which a young boy is gunned down in the middle of the song. The musicians halt. Screams, sirens and an anguished 999 call reverberate around the darkened Albert Hall. After a beat, the choir file on to sorrowfully intone “Trouble… we don’t want no trouble,” and Kano stands silent, spotlit, his face in his hand. The place breaks into wild cheering, before the track starts up again. Mindful of the need not to piously lecture, Kano has a variety of points to make. “The beef, please drop it cos it don’t make money,” he sings – another recent development – at the end. He makes reference to the delicacy of his position, portraying a ruthless dealer on TV while urging change in his music.
Another strand to Kano’s lyricism finds him putting street aggro to one side and dwelling on ordinary life, with vignettes of normal people just spending their time. T-shirt Weather in the Manor is a high point tonight from Made in the Manor, in which barbecues and ice-cream vans figure lyrically and a good-time party spirit prevails for a while. It ends, though, with a jaded flow from Kano, mourning that loss of innocence.
However varied an artist Kano has become, the energy definitely peaks for the straight-up grime tracks, with a moshpit forming for Kano’s ancient 2007 breakthrough track, P’s and Q’s (another rewind, trombones to the fore). Fast-forward over a decade and the spirit of the good old, bad old days of pirate radio station Deja Vu FM is revived on Class of Deja, in which Kano goes head to head with his former Nasty Crew cohorts D Double E (a mentor figure to the young Kano) and Ghetts, also long since a solo MC in his own right – or, as the track has it, “legends assemble”. The three ferocious MCs recount the days in which they climbed on to housing estate roofs with temporary aerials. They could have asked for three microphones – this is, after all, a classy joint. Instead, the three ferocious MCs pass the one mic between them, old school, sharing sweat and spittle.
