Loyle Carner - Motion, Bristol 12th February
Posted on: 2017-02-15
Our rating:
The man who has injected some soul into UK hip-hop returns to perform for a full-house at Motion, four months after having played next door at the Marble Factory.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Ben Coyle-Larner is slightly down in the dumps. Well, if the content of his debut album Yesterday’s Gone, put out under his spooner-pseudonym Loyle Carner, was all you had to go on. On the record, which uses a posed photo of his family and friends for its sleeve, the rapper brings its back story to the front, channelling his often-difficult past into acutely confessional hip-hop. Dealing with subjects like the absence of his birth-father, the subsequent death of his step-father and his diagnosis with ADHD as a child, it does, at times, represent a heavy listen.
It is also a hugely enjoyable one, and has been lapped up by listeners and critics alike; charting at number five and receiving an eye-popping 84 on Metacritic, the explosion of success since its release in January would surely put a smile onto even the stoniest of faces.
Indeed, in the first of his garrulous inter-song ripostes to the full-house at Motion on Sunday evening, he addresses this, joking, “You must think I’m a miserable b******, I swear” - which, when the first lines he had spat were “No, I don’t believe him / But know that I’ve been grieving”, isn’t an unfair assumption. These are the opening bars of ‘The Isle of Arran’, the highlight with which Yesterday’s Gone begins, a soulful number with a refrain sampled from the SCI Youth Choir’s ‘The Lord Will Make a Way’. The bars in between are delivered with aplomb, his unfettered flow working particularly well in providing contrast to the witty, if macabre, one-liners lines which end each verse: “there’s nothing to believe in, believe me.”
As well as dealing with the death of his grandfather, the song’s lyrics touch on his ADHD which rears its frantic head afterward, with Carner’s frenzied welcome and thanks to the crowd which he says is the biggest he has ever performed in front of. And they (somehow) hang on his every word, even though they fire out with a scatter-gun rapidity - the guy is infinitely likeable, with his genuine earnestness apparent in everything that falls out of his mouth. This carries through into ‘Mean It In The Morning’ and ‘+44’, a song and a poem respectively which deal similarly with the false promises that lust can engender.
Tonight’s set-list then follows that of the album into ‘Damselfly’, Carner’s collaboration with BFF Tom Misch, who receives a ‘big up’ from the crowd on the rapper’s request. The track’s jazzy, Dilla-esque production makes it a contender for the evening’s finest; the tale of unrequited, too-young-for-you love getting hips swaying where arms were previously bouncing, with Misch’s woozy chorus echoing a thousand-fold around the skate-park.
Another collaboration gets an airing (after a run-of-the-mill run-through of the guitar-backed ‘Stars & Shards’); this time it’s the Kwes-shared ‘Florence’. The track, as with each of the others receives a lengthy soliloquised back story by way of introduction (this one imagines the baby daughter his mum had always wanted alongside her two boys) and, as with each of the others, is met with chants of ‘Loyle, Loyle, Loyle’ from the audience - who evidently aren’t feeling at their most imaginative.
For next track, ‘No Worries’, the DJ with whom Carner has solely shared the stage steps down from behind his decks to be introduced as Rebel Kleff, and a man without whom Yesterday’s Gone would not have been possible. Be that as it may, his rapping is not phenomenal and serves as a reminder of just how good Carner is. Together the pair rattle through a cover of A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Check The Rhyme’ which comes as a tribute to the late Phyfe Dawg - and is really rather good.
At its close, Rebel slinks back to the booth, where he will stay for the remainder, as Carner begins to explain the meaning behind the piece of fabric that he has clutched in his free hand for the entirety of the set thus far. It is the Eric Cantona-emblazoned Manchester United shirt given to him by his late step-dad who, he explains, was also a musician and had promised that they would tour the world together. Now he takes the number with him every time he performs so that they can, as he puts it, “Share the stage together” - despite the fact that he is a Liverpool fan.
Incited audience shouts of “Ooh ah, Cantona” precede ‘BFG’ on which, at the song’s cathartic crux, the rapper laments, “Everybody says I’m f****** sad, / Of course I’m f****** sad, I miss my f****** dad”. When he finishes though, he looks anything but.
A similar tribute to his mother comes as he leaves the stage (after ‘Ain’t Nothing Changed’ and ‘NO CD’) to the sound of his mother reading the poem which piggybacks ‘Sun Of Jean’, the warming words which describe the magic challenges of raising this ‘scribble of a boy’, before the concluding strains of ‘Yesterday’s Gone’ - the folk song penned by his step-dad - ring out.
For a few minutes it looks like that is that, and that would have done very nicely. But Carner cannot resist extending what he tells us is “the best gig he has ever done” with an encore of a poem that “genuinely wasn’t planned”. As with the Cantona shtick, it would be easy to cynically dismiss these as superficial, were it not for the nagging suspicion that he is just actually quite a nice guy.
He’s quite good at the old rapping thing, too.
Article by:
An ardent Geordie minus the accent, Sam seemingly strove to get as far away from the Toon as possible, as soon as university beckoned. Three undergraduate years at UoB were more than ample time for Bristol (as it inevitably does) to get under his skin, and so here he remains: reporting, as Assistant Editor, on the cultural happenings which so infatuated him with the city. Catch him at sam@365bristol.com.
