Loyle Carner
It’s a bitterly cold winter like evening outside and by the time that I actually make it into the venue this evening after a very bizarre long hour spent queuing up, I am absolutely frozen to the bone (it’s not good for a man my age!). With five minutes to spare before Loyle Carner enters the stage, I grab a drink and look to get a decent vantage point but to no avail, its rammed down there on the floor tonight. The closest to the floor that we are going to get at this time of the evening unfortunately is the bar area and that was as good as it got. When you spend your evening on your tip toes, looking round people’s heads or through lots of arm pits when arms are aloft it just becomes a bit of a switch off for me, I always feel that you need to be in on the action, much closer, but this is as good as I am going to get tonight to getting down with the kids (ha-ha!).
There were plenty of spaces in the car park and that’s rather unusual when it’s a sell out gig at the LCR, but tonight the crowd are very young in (hence the number of empty bottles and cans that are strewn on the walkway as we amble at a snail’s pace towards the entrance). They won’t be able to buy a drink when they get in the venue, but I certainly needed one after that long wait outside.
I am able to spot, that as soon as Loyle Carner enters the stage the audience are in raptures, arms waving side to side, in an instant everyone is having a good time. I can certainly feel the vibe and the love back here.
I have been looking to try and catch him live for some time now and while a lot of his material isn’t something that I’d particularly put at the top of my list to play and buy, I think that he has a great vibe and style and I really do love some of his music.
Loyle Carner aged just 28 still, is an incredible young man, he’s growing up and has gone from an emerging talent to a benchmark singer now on the UK hip hop scene, right now he is the main man and a true inspiration to others. If you didn’t already know his stage name is in part a spoof of his real name Coyle Larner as a point of reference to his childhood struggle with both ADHD and dyslexia (how cool is that). This young man clearly has an eye on looking out for young people that faced the same or similar struggles to himself, he also runs a cookery school with his partner for children with ADHD called Chill Con Carner.
Nominated for three Brit awards along with the Mercury Music prize and NME awards also along with the ‘Hottest Record of the Year’ with Nobody Knows (Ladas Road) in . He also won the Best British Solo Artist from the NME in 2018. Songs such as Hate, Plastic, You Don’t Know, Speed Of Plight, Still, Aint Nothing Changed, and Ice Water (his duet with Jorja Smith) are absolutely fabulous this evening and the massive are in raptures as soon as Smith’s voice bellows out over the speakers on the latter. The brilliant Nobody Knows (Ladas Road) indicates that we are getting close to the end of the set, a set list where there is rather bizarrely no room for the epic Isle Of Arran! You have to have some swagger and balls if you’re able to leave a track as great as that out of your show, don’t you? It’s a song of epic proportion, but its tossed aside it would seem for tonight at least for some lesser quality material.
There’s just one song left for the encore, there’s enough time for Ottolenghi. Carner then closes with a final rap as we shuffle towards the exit and the cold night air.
We make a hasty retreat toward the exit doors and back into that cold night air and make an even quicker getaway from the car park.
