Music / Hip-hop
Review: Nelly, O2 Academy
This wasn’t like your usual gig crowd. At least eighty percent female, dressed to the nines in Friday night finery and ready to party at all costs, it felt more like any given weekend at Pryzm than a kind of hip-hop show. But that’s not to put down what was a thoroughly entertaining evening.
For a start, the atmosphere was electric, and that wasn’t solely to do with the high quantity of shiny fabrics in the audience. In fact, you’d swear that if they wired this audience up to the national grid once they’d started bumping and grinding that they could have powered Yate for the rest of the weekend. No, what you had here was a room full of people ready to have the best time ever.
The lad himself slunk on slowly, so laid back that you’d have sworn he was still swirling from whatever his personal relaxant of choice was before the show. But from the second he cracked open the stage door the screams began to rattle out. It was like a One Direction show for grown ups, and man did they love this St Louis boy as they hung on his every word.
is needed now More than ever
After a slow motion opening he quickly began to thaw out, his one time signature sneer now replaced by the confident smile of a man who’s been living well at leisure for a fair old time. As he spat out his sly, bluesy jams, his two sidemen punctuated each line with their skilled interjections. He engaged the audience like a master, pointing and waving and winking to such an extent that everyone in the room felt like he was performing just to them. The hits flowed, and by the time he got to the sugary sweet Dilemma, the whole building was in his grasp. He even spread the love to the bros with a ‘shout out to all the fellas’, just so that they didn’t feel left out.
As things drew to an end, just after a slab of new material from his upcoming All Work No Play EP, he slapped us broadside with a sleazy version of his most infectious swagger to date, a peerless Hot In Herre – and every last person hammered out the chorus at the top of their croaky pipes. Despite his recent bad times, following an unresolved rape accusation and a pretty enormous tax bill, he seemed simply happy to be there. Plus huge swathes of the audience seemed utterly and innocently thrilled by seeing someone so famous with their own eyes.
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