It’s hard to know how a young person will cope when they become Very Famous, Very Quickly.
Some take to it like a duck to water and nobly use their fame and fortune to further causes that are close to their hearts. (Yes, Emma Watson, we’re looking at you). Others, of course, use their new-found wealth and notoriety to hoover up as many Class A-drugs, tabloid inches, and notches on their bedpost as they can lay their newly diamond-stacked hands on.
Some #celebs, however, don’t appear to change at all.
In just over a year, 23-year-old Scotsman Lewis Capaldi has gone from being a little-known singer-songwriter to being one of the biggest popstars on the planet.
His breakthrough single Someone You Loved spent seven – seven! – weeks at number one in the UK, and three weeks in the USA. His debut album, Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent, is the biggest-selling album of the year, and he’s the only artist to ever sell out a headline UK arena tour before he even released his debut album.
That, dear reader, isn’t bad going. And that’s why, when Someone You Loved hit the peak of the charts back in March, we half-expected young Mr. Capaldi to have flown slightly off the rails by the end of the year.
Would we, we wondered, be seeing pictures of him with his trousers down in the middle of a London nightclub by the end of the year? Would there be numerous exposés in the end-of-year papers, each bearing headlines like ‘I Slept With Lewis Capaldi And All I Got Was This Lousy STI’? The possibilities, it seemed, were endless.
Fortunately, it doesn’t appear to have affected him at all.
In fact, judging by his performance at Bristol’s O2 Academy, it’s clear that he hasn’t merely managed to emerge unscathed from the fires of fame. Instead, he’s positively reveling in it.
Throughout the course of his ninety-minute set, Lewis Capaldi plays a ten-minute round of Air Cricket with the crowd; informs his audience that ‘if they’re ready for a rock ‘n’ roll show, they’re in the wrong room’; and, leads his adoring faithful in a chant of ‘OHHHHH, LEWIS CAPALDI’. (Oh, come on: like you really need us to tell you which tune it was bellowed to).
Yet, in between all the #banter, he also manages to deliver a pitch-perfect set of some of the best sad-pop bops that have surfaced from this country in the last year-and-a-bit. Say what you like about Capaldi, but we defy anyone to stand and watch him belt out Bruises, Hold Me While You Wait, and One and not – even begrudgingly – be seriously impressed.
Then, of course, he’s got the victory lap. The reason everybody came and the song that we’ve all been waiting to hear. Yes, dear reader, we’re talking about the inevitable encore of ‘The Hit’.
For a lot of artists, this is, quite visibly, a chore. In fact, we’ve lost track of the amount of times we’ve seen a hapless one-hit wonder pour their heart and soul into an hour-long set, only to noticeably stop giving a damn as soon as they see everybody in attendance losing their collective shit to that one god-awful pop song that made a minor dent in the charts ten or so years ago.
That, however, is not the case for Lewis Capaldi. In fact, when the first notes of Someone You Loved twinkle their way into earshot, Capaldi‘s face lights up just as much as anyone’s in the audience. Maybe it was the fact that every single person in the crowd bellowed every word back at him like their lives depended on it; or maybe it was the half a bottle of beer that he downed before the end of the intro.
Either way, it was adorable.
So, in conclusion, we can confirm that Lewis Capaldi does not appear to be having a fame-induced mental breakdown.
He doesn’t seem to have slipped into a drug-addled stupor; he has, to the naked eye, not developed a habit of stumbling out of Stringfellows with that month’s Hot Young Thing on his arm; and, crucially, he hasn’t resorted to utilising any number of cheesy marketing tricks in order to shift a couple of extra copies of the ‘Deluxe’ (read: Mum-friendly) edition of his debut album.
Instead, he appears to have nailed the knack of putting on an arena-sized live show while still retaining the same candidness, humour, and every-man relatability that got him to those stages in the first place.
We think he’s doing rather well, really.