Many bands sink without trace, but it's rarer these days for a band to have seemingly risen without trace. It's a little over a year since London Grammar first posted the track Hey Now online, and it's now had more than 3m plays. Their debut album, which went in at No 2, has sold in excess of 250,000 copies, but it seems to have happened almost by stealth. While Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke grab the sensationalist headlines, London Grammar have, in the UK at least, outsold them both.
Frontwoman Hannah Reid and guitarist Dan Rothman first met in halls at Nottingham University. They discovered third member Dot Major in the student union. Playing a djembe. (London Grammar were never going to sound like Oasis.) They signed to Ministry of Sound straight from university in 2012, and credit has to go to the label and band's management, Ross Allen and Big Life, for nurturing them until they were ready, even if that took longer than expected. Appropriately titled If You Wait, their debut was released last September, just in time to be eligible for the Mercury prize; surely no coincidence. They were initially tipped to win, then didn't even make the shortlist, but that's probably the only disappointment in their short career.
Tonight they're fresh from a tour of Australia, which has tried to claim them as its own. "They're almost anonymous in their home country," exaggerated the Sydney Morning Herald recently. "Triple J [Australian radio station] was the first radio station in the world to start playing their music."
The show opens not with a bang but with the whisper of the opening notes of the slow-burning Hey Now, and then the first signs of that voice. Reid's vocals have drawn comparisons with Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine, but that does her a slight disservice. While Reid's vocals can be similarly billowy, she has much more subtlety than the bombastic Welch. Her voice may be the focal point for most of the show, but it stops short of coming across as showy.
The band must be bored with the xx comparisons, and although, along with Daughter and James Blake, they're part of the post-xx generation (Generation xx?), London Grammar argue it's more a case of them sharing similar influences than the direct effect of the xx. Live, you can hear echoes of the crepuscular, nocturnal soundscapes of Burial and the post-trip-hop Bristolian influence of Massive Attack and, in particular, Portishead. Also, to a lesser extent Beirut, Radiohead and the National. But a band who cover Chris Isaak are clearly not obsessed with being hip, and the odd guitar lick tonight is more Chris Rea or Mark Knopfler than xx-rated.
The restrained anthem Wasting My Young Years is greeted with the all too common sight of a sea of camera phones held aloft, which seems ironically fitting. If spending a gig filming it on your phone instead of actually immersing yourself in the experience isn't wasting your young years, it's certainly wasting the experience of being at a gig.
I must have seen 100 gigs at this venue over the past 25 years, from the La's to Beastie Boys, but can't recall an atmosphere quite like tonight's. During quieter numbers, such as Interlude and Shyer, there's a polite, almost reverential hush from much of the crowd, followed by a huge cheer after the last note. The crowd is as polite as the music sometimes is.
We don't get the band's cover of Chris Isaak's Wicked Game, but we do get their stripped-back interpretation of Nightcall by French house artist Kavinsky. It's a short set of only 12 songs, which is simply their debut album plus bonus song Darling Are You Gonna Leave Me, on which Dot returns to his djembe, as he does on Flickers. I seem to be in a minority in finding the set a little one-paced, with the majority of the crowd entranced.
London Grammar still seem a little stunned by how quickly this has all happened for them. This is their biggest headline show yet; last time they were in Manchester they played the much smaller Sound Control. On a recce to the Academy they had been shocked at its size, Rothman recounts to the crowd: "It's amazing to think we've filled it with our fans."
Kitty Empire is away
