110. John Grant

Hammersmith Apollo

12 November 2015

John Grant, that wry, wounded baritone in a beard, was once the kind of artist you had to discover at indie record shops. Now he’s casually filling London’s larger venues like it’s no big deal. This from a man who left the relative comfort of The Czars, who’s navigated heartbreak, addiction, and an HIV diagnosis. This is a man for whom the universe owes more than a debt.

The first time I saw him was at the Roundhouse, where he nearly broke the emotional Richter scale with “Glacier”, a performance so pin-drop silent you’d have thought the crowd had collectively stopped breathing. But tonight, in the grand old art-deco sprawl of the Hammersmith Apollo, he’s something else entirely. Bigger. Brighter. Bolder. A man very much enjoying his imperial phase.

This time, he’s backed by a full band, complete with Budgie from Siouxsie and the Banshees on drums. It’s a lineup that means business, and Grant conducts it all like a man who’s done his time in the shadows.

He opens with the title track from Grey Tickles, Black Pressure, all twitchy synths, before sliding into the absurdist heartbreak of “GMF” and the devastating euphoria of “It Doesn’t Matter to Him.” The songs are deliciously contradictory: devastating and hilarious, self-lacerating and grandiose, often all at once. And somehow, through that velvet fog of a voice, he makes lines like “I am the greatest motherfucker that you’re ever gonna meet” sound like both a swagger and a sob.

And then there’s “Glacier.” Oh, Glacier. Stripped back, spotlit, and heartbreaking all over again. It’s a song that feels less like a performance and more like a sermon for the emotionally bruised. The room stills, hearts tighten, throats lump. This is what we came for.

Between songs, he chats like an old friend, full of dry humour and warm digressions. He’s funny in that melancholic, deadpan way that makes you think he’s probably brilliant company at dinner.

Grant doesn’t just sing his pain, he alchemises it. Into synths, sarcasm, lullabies, rage, disco beats and torch songs. Tonight in Hammersmith, he gave us all of it. The sadness, the sass, the scars. And he made five thousand people feel like they were sitting in his living room while he told them everything was going to be alright, even if it wasn’t. Especially if it wasn’t.