The Man Of The Moment and the Next Big Thing combine
If you ask us, there’s a strong case to be made that George Ezra is the biggest male solo artist in Britain right now. After all, not only did he absolutely clean up at the BRITs last month, but he’s also shifted some serious units of his last album – that’s 2018’s Staying at Tamara’s, in case you’ve been living under a rock – and his track Shotgun was, for all intents and purposes, the bona-fide Sound Of The Summer. (Well, once Three Lions was shoved back in its drawer for another two years, anyway).
There is also, dearest reader, a pretty solid case to be made that Sigrid is going to Save Pop Music.
Sure, that job should’ve been taken care of by Ms. Carly Rae Jepsen, but we’re not going to nitpick: after all, as long as somebody is pumping out banger after banger at a faster rate than a cheap ‘n’ cheerful sausage factory, we’re not going to complain too much. And, if her just-released debut album Sucker Punch is anything to go by, then we can consider Pop Music not only ‘saved’, but left in safe hands for the foreseeable future. It’s a strikingly confident collection, and one that manages to pack in more uber-catchy pop songs than most pop stars manage to pop out in an entire career; you’d be a bit of a plonker not to check it out.
So, when we found out that these two mighty forces would be combining for one epic UK arena tour, we knew that we had to head down there – and, head down we did. Here’s our verdict:
Sigrid
Here’s a bold statement for you: we think that Sigrid is going to be headlining arenas within the next couple of years. Sure, she may be a fairly new artist, but she’s already got enough stone-cold hits to pad out an entire arena spectacular; and, if her blistering thirty-minute set in Cardiff was anything to go by, then she’s already more than capable of holding an entire enormodrome in the palm of her still-only-22-years-old hand. She opened with a Sucker Punch, begged us not to kill her vibe, and left us feeling like anything but Strangers by the end – we wouldn’t bet against Sigrid becoming a superstar.
George Ezra
Aw, George Ezra. He’s… Well, he’s just nice, isn’t he? He’s got a nice smile. He’s got good hair. His songs are pretty, and catchy, and exactly the sort of thing that your Mum will sing along to when they pop up on Radio 1 while she’s doing the school run. Even his stage show is nice: modeled after a living room, there are armchairs and table lamps and gramophones scattered around the stage, and a bunch of Chinese lantern-esque living room lights descend from the rafters of the arena as the set hits the halfway point. It is, all things considered, rather lovely.
Of course, all of this mustn’t detract from the fact that Mr. Ezra has got some serious songwriting chops.
For a man who’s only on his second album, he hasn’t half managed to cram a lot of mega-hits into a relatively short career thus far, and he whacked them out all in Cardiff. Remember Budapest? That gets an airing. Listen To The Man? Wheeled out in due course. Oh, and Paradise, Barcelona, Pretty Shining People and Did You Hear The Rain? Yes, of course, he played those too.
The highlight of the set, though – and, judging by the reaction of a lot of people in attendance, of their lives so far – comes in the form of a little-known track that goes by the name of Shotgun. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last nine months, let us attempt to explain it to you: imagine the catchiest little ditty you ever did hear. Then, wrap it up into a tight ‘lil bundle and forcibly insert it into your consciousness for the foreseeable future, complete with a minuscule chance that you’ll ever get it out of there and a lingering yet promising idea that the universality of this track might – just might – lead to world peace if the United Nations plays its cards right.
Naturally, it’s the perfect set closer: after all, it’s probably the only track of the night that all audience members – from Grannies to grumpy dragged-along-by-teenagers parents via excited young children and middle-class date nighters – scream back into the face of the visibly-delighted Ezra with equal gusto, thus serving to both unify an entire arena’s worth of people and make dead certain that Shotgun is going to be stuck in the head of your humble reviewer for, he suspects, the rest of his time on this Earth.
Now, isn’t that nice?