The last time Stormzy performed live in the UK was early last year, playing arena shows seemingly designed to underline that you were in the presence of Britain’s biggest rapper. There were vast quantities of pyrotechnics, endless flashy lighting effects and a stage set with a giant rendering of the scales of justice. The whole thing was preceded by a lengthy video, trailing his forthcoming third album as if it was a blockbuster film, the first salvo in a campaign that took it as read that This Is What I Mean was going to be one of 2022’s biggest albums.
A year and a half on, things feel different. This Is What I Mean was an artistic triumph, but it didn’t sell anything like the kind of quantities its predecessors did: a week at No 1 then out of the Top 10 entirely, never to return. Stormzy is clearly still a very big deal – his solitary UK gig of 2023 involves taking over an entire day of the All Points East festival, curating a bill that includes sometime collaborators Sampha and Knucks alongside Kehlani and Ms Banks – but as his headline set begins, the contrast with his last tour is almost jarring. Flashy lighting and special effects are nowhere to be seen. Everything and indeed everyone – a live band, eight backing vocalists – is swathed in muted, tasteful shades of brown and beige: it’s like a Farrow & Ball catalogue. The set is heavy on lovelorn, subtle songs from This Is What I Mean, interspersed with dips into the slow-motion end of his back catalogue: Cigarettes & Cush, Crown. It feels as if you are getting more of Stormzy the singer than Stormzy the rapper for your money.
It’s an approach that is bullish and risky. You could infer a lot from the way Stormzy’s face lights up in a broad grin when the crowd starting singing along, or turn the chorus of recent single The Weekend into a call-and-response interaction and from the effusiveness with which he thanks them – “I love you from the bottom of my heart… until the day I die, I’ll never stop saying thank you”. Then again, it all sounds great floating into the late summer night: the band are impressively tight, Stormzy is smart enough to realise that the appeal of his vocals rests on their untutored, imperfect quality and he resists the temptation to break out the Auto-Tune. He is also hugely charismatic and likable presence on stage, suggesting that the rain earlier in the day was a “beautifully poetic” preparation for his performance of Rainfall, and breaking from the setlist to honour a promise he made to an audience member’s mum that he would sing them Happy Birthday, despite the fact that his attempts to locate them come to grief: “Is there a Marcus here tonight? Where is he? No, there’s a lot of girls putting their hands up, you’re not Marcus. No, it’s not you either, Marcus’s mum was a Black woman. Oh, this is a fraud.”
But after Sampha appears, reprising his guest spot on This is What I Mean’s Sampha’s Plea, everything changes. The stage is plunged into darkness, the band and backing vocalists disappear, replaced by DJ Tiiny, the muted shades are supplanted by strobe lights and Stormzy launches into Big for Your Boots. It’s hard not to notice that people queueing at the food stands start running towards the stage when the track kicks into life, and from then on, it’s a relentless, crowd-pleasing succession of hits: Wiley Flow, Toxic Trait, Clash.
He even manages to turn the inclement weather conditions to his advantage. By the time he plays Shut Up, it’s raining in a way that suggests the rain earlier in the day was merely a rehearsal. He responds by ripping his top off and venturing out on to the walkway at the front of the stage. It seems like a gesture of camaraderie – if you’re getting drenched, I’m getting drenched too – and moreover it looks fantastic on the stage-side screens: stripped to the waist, lashed by the rain, spitting out the lyrics to Vossi Bop, it’s an image that is more arresting and dramatic than anything the special effects people conjured up for his last tour.
It feels a little like two completely different gigs cut and shunted into one, which you could take as evidence of the impressive breadth of what Stormzy does, or suggestive that he ultimately faces a challenge to unite the polarities of his oeuvre more seamlessly. But as the sodden crowd joins in on a final singalong to Blinded By Your Grace Part 2, it rather precludes finding fault: who wants to pick holes in something that feels this joyous and celebratory. Up on stage, delivering a departing speech about this being one of the best nights of his life, Stormzy doesn’t look like a man much worried about his future.
