Just about visible through the forest of raised mobile phones – there’s so many in the air that you fear most of them will end up with footage not of a gig, but of other people’s mobile phones at a gig – and the on-stage crowd of guest rappers and friends filming the occasion for posterity, Nines wears a delighted grin. He appears to have missed the memo about rappers maintaining a degree of insouciant, sullen cool, something one of his guests, SL, achieves by the expedient of performing with his coat zipped up to his nose, guaranteeing a certain moody anonymity. The Haunt may be a substantially smaller venue than you might expect an artist who’s had two Top 5 albums in just over a year to be playing – tickets sold out weeks ago – but nevertheless, he looks extremely pleased to be here.
To borrow the old gag Keith Richards regularly trots out on stage, perhaps he’s pleased to be anywhere, the Metropolitan police having previously proved dauntless in their efforts to stop him performing live. Gigs were cancelled due to “safety concerns”, while YouTube footage shows the rapper both being detained by officers and prevented from entering the Wireless festival to perform a guest spot with Canadian star Tory Lanez, and complaining incredulously that he’s been stopped from even attending a Mist show at the O2.
If his current brief tour represents a low-key return to live performance from an artist who’s barely been on a stage in the time his career has crossed over to mainstream success, there’s nothing tentative about the show itself. The audience – young enough that the venue is checking ID and handing out wristbands to ensure no one under age gets served at the bar – are both loudly word-perfect on his oeuvre and creative in their attempts to get a better view of the action. By three songs in, someone has improved their vantage point by hanging onto an air-conditioning unit attached to the ceiling.
On the stage, it’s endearingly chaotic: microphones squeal with feedback, the bass overwhelms everything else in the backing tracks, guest stars rush on and off (judging by the audience reaction to his appearance, anyone looking for the next crossover star could do worse than put money on Kennington’s Loski, whose afrobeat-flavoured Forrest Gump takes the roof off), and Nines regularly professes himself stumped as to what he’s supposed to be performing next. But through the bedlam, it’s not hard to work out why Nines has pulled ahead commercially from his road rap peers. His sound hits a sweet spot between hard-won authenticity and a contagious euphoria. You can hear a distinct US influence, not least in the smoothness of his delivery, while Liz and Oh My shift from downbeat, piano-sample melancholy to choruses made to bellow along to. His lyrics are unflinching and unrepentant in their depiction of life on the streets of north west London, but they’re really witty with it: “I went through a burglary phase, blacked out like a goth / probably been through more windows than Microsoft.”
The pace never lets up over the course of an hour – all the cameo appearances make it feel like a celebratory, crowd-pleasing UK rap edition of Top of the Pops – and nor does the mood of slightly stunned delight emanating from the man at its centre: “madness, madness, madness” he mutters, as more and more audience members get on each others’ shoulders. Then it suddenly ends, leaving his DJ on the stage to politely thank the departing crowd for coming and buying so many T-shirts.
