Royal Albert Hall, LondonThe star of TV’s Top Boy storms the Albert Hall with a set that fuses beauty with the raw sound of the streets
It starts with someone in the stalls waving a crutch in the air. It ends with tiers of velvet-lined swivel seating quaking as Kano rewinds 3 Wheel Ups, a tune from 2016 in which he boasts that DJs rewind his songs that often because he’s so good. Each reload whips the crowd into stiffer peaks and rattles the seating harder. At one point before the encore, two sousaphone players stage a battle, honking out the hooks of grime classics one after the other, the crowd picking the winner. It is impossible to leave this landmark gig without a wide grin and plenty to mull over.
As a genre, grime has hit any number of conventional milestones in recent years. Stormzy has headlined Glastonbury, Skepta and Dave have won Mercury prizes and Wiley has been given an MBE, to name a few – but there is still something deeply symbolic in this east
London takeover of the seat of the
British musical establishment. It’s not an absolute first:
BBC 1Xtra staged a grime prom in 2015, and the venue has latterly made space for Afrobeats and drum’n’bass. But tickets for the final date on Kano’s current
UK tour sold out in minutes and even if the Albert Hall’s outreach programme meant they were reasonably priced, this gig is really the result of two-way rapprochement in which a former Cinderella genre, actively persecuted by
police for a decade, comes of age. It would be unfair to rob Kano of his menace and immediacy by saying he is a mature artist, but there is a logic to Kane Robinson being the grime artist on this stage.