The Daily Telegraph - 19.08.2019

Inside the mind of a

pop star like no other

‘I

was born in Yorkshire and raised

in Suffolk, so I felt like I needed to

play these shows,” said Ed

Sheeran to a mud-caked Leeds

audience on Friday as he opened up

the final run of his Divide Tour, which

concludes with four homecoming gigs

in Ipswich over the bank holiday

weekend. Two and a half years in, it

has now overtaken U2 as the highest-

grossing tour ever.

Marking this place in musical

history is emblematic of Sheeran’s

omnipotence and stark transformation

from busker to global superstar. His

recent No. 6 Collaborations Project

topped charts worldwide, while the

reverberations from 2017’s multi-

million-selling album Divide can still

be felt everywhere.

In many ways, his rise is at odds

with his minimal set-up, armed as he is

with just an acoustic guitar and a loop

pedal to sing songs that are regularly

more tender and intimate than

extravagant and vivacious. However,

part of his appeal seems to lie in his

ability to turn open-mic night

outpourings into relatable mass

singalongs. The opening Castle on the

Hill was testament to this, as the

crowd roared into life and screamed

every word in unison. He later paid

thanks to their lung-busting efforts,

saying, “This isn’t a one-man show, it’s

a two-man show with you guys. It

wouldn’t happen without you.”

Sheeran’s street-busker

approach to enormous

gigs is starting to pall

L

ast week, Ariana Grande

tweeted a message of

thanks while in rehearsals

for the three London dates

on her European tour. “I

can’t express how free and

full singing makes me feel,” she wrote.

“I’ve been feeling so anxious lately and

it all kinda lifts off when I sing. I’m

grateful for this gift... it’s comforting

because no one can take it away from

me.”

For Grande, currently one of the

biggest pop stars in the world, music

has been therapy more than most,

providing shelter from a number of

traumas in recent years, each serving

as a tragic backdrop to what has been a

creative and commercial flourishing.

On the first night of the European

leg of her Sweetener tour, and her first

major UK concert since the

Manchester Arena terrorist attack that

took the lives of 22 people in 2017,

Grande was in good spirits, shimmying

and strutting her way through a

packed setlist, her vocals

characteristically smooth, confident

and effortlessly acrobatic.

But there was also a melancholy

there in her relative lack of audience

interaction, and in the animated stage

backdrops that were as impressive as

they were lonely, depicting night

skies, starlight and solitary planets.

For one track, Grande stood beneath

an enormous projection of the moon,

bathed solely in red light as if she were

the only person in the O2.

That contradiction, of irresistible

pop buoyancy and desperate

sadness, has also made Grande one of

the most fascinating and decidedly

human superstars of the modern era.

She’s a young woman who rejects

typical pop-star artifice in favour of

honesty about her grief and mental

health, who has formed an

unshakeable and mutually healing

bond with her fans via social media,

and who, after years of pulling

disparately from a variety of sounds

and genres, has finally found her

artistic voice.

It also meant that her Sweetener

setlist leaned heavily in favour of her

two most recent and strongest albums,

released within five months of each

other. These comprised largely of

dreamy, downtempo R&B and

space-age pop. Into You and Break

Free, two of her more

straightforwardly energetic pop tracks

from earlier in her career, were still

the night’s biggest crowd-pleasers, but

its most surprising pleasures were

found in unexpected places. Breathin’,

a head-rush of a single inspired by

Grande’s struggles with anxiety, was

transformed into something

resembling a lost Prince number

thanks to a frantic guitar solo that

carried it to its climax, while The Light

Is Coming, a repetitive racket featuring

Nicki Minaj in original form, was

reimagined as an assault of whistles

and blips that brought to mind, of all

things, The B-52s.

Out on her own: Ariana Grande performs her current show, Sweetener, at the O2 Arena in south-east London, her performance an unusual mixture of magic and melancholy

Everyman colossus:

Ed Sheeran carries

the crowd in Leeds

Tonight and tomorrow, O2, London;

Aug 24-25, Manchester Pride Festival,

Mayfield: arianagrande.com

Tickets:

edsheeran.com/

tour

KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY IMAGES

While Sheeran’s overly earnest, deeply

emotive everyman songs already

produce something of a love-hate

response, his foray into rap on Eraser,

the opening track on Divide, produced

a feeling more akin to the latter with

its clunky and cringey delivery. It’s an

approach mirrored by the way that

Sheeran spoke on stage too, often

filling silences with awkward small

talk like a substitute teacher on their

first day.

It’s when Sheeran was locked into

his guitar-playing and singing, with

the loop pedal adding a multilayered

accompaniment, that he was most

comfortable and convincing. It’s a

difficult task to make a solo acoustic

performance feel captivating to tens of

thousands of people – especially given

the relatively low-key visuals and lack

of theatrics – but he managed to

project his sparse love songs in a way

that gripped and unified the audience.

As the evening went on – with the

exception of Irish folk band Beoga,

who came on to shift the tempo with a

string-soaked take on Galway Girl

• the limitations of Sheeran’s set up
  manifested. There was no Stormzy,
  Khalid or Bruno Mars coming out to
  replicate their guest spots from No. 6
  Collaborations Project, and, after
  almost two hours, things became
  one-note. A closing run of tracks such
  as Perfect and the more rock-driven
  Blow ended the night, and the crowd’s
  empathetic screams for Shape of You
  could be heard several towns over as
  the infectious melody rang out.
  Sheeran’s one-man-and-his-dog
  street-busker approach to playing
  gargantuan shows is beginning to feel
  a little tired, underwhelming and
  repetitive, but his dominance and
  ongoing success is unlikely to waver
  any time soon.

Pop

Ed Sheeran

Roundhay Park, Leeds

★★★★★

By Daniel Dylan Wray

Arts

A ribcage-rattling homecoming for

this glorious powerhouse of rock

‘O

f all the places we love to play

in the world, this is the best,”

announced Skunk Anansie’s

frontwoman Skin to the packed house

at Brixton Academy. You might think

that most performers say that to all the

venues on tour, but Skin’s sentiment

felt warmly genuine: the singer-

musician (aka Deborah Anne Dyer)

grew up with her Jamaican family in

this south-London neighbourhood,

and it lent a homecoming spirit to the

night.

Skunk Anansie have, of course,

been “here” before. In the mid-

Nineties, they tore into the music

industry, harnessing the energy of the

Britrock scene while offering an

antidote to its bloated blokeyness: here

was a multiracial band with

satisfyingly punchy tunes and political

riffs, led by a powerful black queer

woman. They went massive with

global hits including Hedonism and

Secretly, but they were also widely

mocked in a mainstream era that was

pretty reactionary (and, in hindsight,

easily intimidated).

The band seemed to fade from

public consciousness when they took a

break between then and their fourth

album Wonderlustre (2010), and many

people have since forgotten that it was

Skin, not Beyoncé, who became

Glastonbury’s first black female

headliner, when Skunk Anansie

helmed the festival’s Pyramid Stage in

1999. Saturday night’s London date,
      part of a European tour marking their
      25th anniversary, proved that they
      were really a force reawakened, and
      that 52-year-old Skin – still shaven-
      headed and mighty-lunged, rocking an

avant-garde chic (her outfit for

opening number Charlie Big Potato

resembled a space-age pom-pom) – has

aged infinitely better than any

Britrock “lad”.

There was a reassuringly old-school

air in a venue that has barely changed

in decades, but Skunk Anansie played

with gloriously full-blooded force – so

much so, that I resorted to ear

protection a few numbers in. (I’ve

reached the age where gig-related

deafness is no longer a badge of

honour.) Nothing could dampen the

ribcage-rattling impact, though, and

Skin’s agile, exhilarating energy felt

infectious. She remains a phenomenal

vocal talent, and she soared through

classics including I Can Dream while

diving into the delighted, diverse

crowd: from teens to seasoned punks,

all genders and races, the most

joyously aggro-free mosh pit I have

ever experienced.

While Skin was an utterly undeniable

powerhouse, credit was also due to the

band’s collective talent, including Cass

Lewis’s brilliant, surging basslines in

numbers such as Twisted (Everyday

Hurts). The spiky new numbers,

including the latest single What You Do

For Love, held up well alongside

hyper-ballads such as Weak.

When Skin got political, it felt

tender rather than stilted – Skunk

Anansie’s fury has never been

directionless, and their 1995 debut

single Little Baby Swastikkka felt

eerily resonant in 2019. There were

abundant highlights, and two encores:

at one point, Skin dedicated a cover of

Paul Weller’s You Do Something To Me

to her girlfriend, before the Modfather

himself strolled on stage for a duet.

Most memorably, there was the image

of Skin singing as the crowd carried

her aloft: a crowd-surfing queen,

reclaiming her crown.

Pop

Skunk Anansie

Brixton Academy, London SW9

★★★★★

By Arwa Haider

Pop

Ariana Grande:

Sweetener Tour

O2 Arena, London SE10

★★★★★

By Adam White

Better than ever: Skunk Anansie frontwoman Skin takes the Brixton Academy by storm

GOFFPHOTOS.COM

Wonderfully, the show felt like

Grande at her most autonomous:

entirely nonsensical as a piece of

concert storytelling, but thrillingly so.

At times, she was Jesus Christ at the

centre of a Last Supper of writhing

dancers; at others, she was Marilyn

Monroe, warbling a cover of My Heart

Belongs to Daddy during an interlude.

There was footage from old home

movies and the Goldie Hawn comedy

The First Wives Club, snippets of tracks

by Lil’ Kim and Diana Ross, and an

encore performance of the number

one single Thank U, Next, complete

with Grande and her dancers waving

Pride flags.

As her thoughts, ideas and

inspirations tumbled over one another

with no rhythm or logic, it felt as if we

had all been drawn directly into her

mind. While it was slightly

exasperating, this is also the mind of

the most exciting young star in pop,

and you wished beyond all reason that

you could stay there for ever.

The Daily Telegraph Monday 19 August 2019 *** 23

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