179. London Grammar
O2 Academy Brixton
30 October 2017
You can tell a lot about a band by the noise their audience makes before the lights go down. At London Grammar, there’s barely a murmur. A few polite clinks of gin tins. A whisper of expectation. Nobody’s pre-loading to “Wasting My Young Years.” Nobody’s here to mosh. This isn’t that kind of evening.
Brixton Academy was packed but reverent, a congregation of tasteful introverts who probably alphabetise their Spotify playlists and use coasters. The house lights dimmed, the murmurs stopped, and Hannah Reid stepped into the blue light looking like she’d wandered out of an Edward Hopper painting and accidentally joined a synth trio.
Then that voice. It’s one thing to hear London Grammar on headphones, that ghostly, aching sound that makes you stare pensively out of bus windows. But live, Reid’s voice could stop traffic. It’s vast, precise, it is heartbreak made audible.
They opened with “Rooting for You”, a track that builds so slowly it could have been written by someone trying to reassemble time itself. You could have heard a pin drop in the building. Then came “Big Picture,” “Wasting My Young Years,” and a handful from the new album Truth Is a Beautiful Thing, each one delivered with a glacial restraint.
Between songs, Hannah mumbled soft thank-yous like a schoolteacher apologising for assigning homework, whilst Dan Rothman and Dot Major stood in their minimalist semicircle, surrounded by glowing synths and the faint tinge of artisanal anxiety.
The visuals were simple; shafts of white light cutting through dry ice, effective, if not a little leaned towards the designer perfume advert end of things. But this is a masterclass in understatement. There’s something almost absurd about watching a crowd of thousands stand completely still for ninety minutes, but that’s the London Grammar experience.
That was also the heart of the problem for me. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore Hannah Reid’s voice. It’s one of those rare things: fragile, commanding, capable of stopping a room dead. But back then, it all felt so achingly undersold. The band seemed almost reluctant to be there, like they’d been coaxed onstage by a kindly but insistent music teacher. There was beauty, but not yet belief, as if they were renting the stage for the night rather than owning it outright.
Reid herself came across as being just the other side of a pane of glass, close enough to own the experience, but somehow sealed off from it. You could sense the storm within, but not yet the confidence to let it break.
Yet, with nine years of hindsight, and having recently seen them, just the three of them, completely own an arena, that glass didn’t just crack; it shattered. The band that once seemed hesitant now stood fearless, fully realised, pulling their audience into every note. It was the rarest thing: a black-swan moment when a band not only reaches its potential but brings everyone along for the ride. And honestly, there’s no one I’d rather have seen it happen to.