Lewis Capaldi
Hydro, Glasgow
As he braced himself for a potentially crazy sold out hometown show, Lewis Capaldi issued the ground rules for the evening. There was only one: no fighting. Capaldi reckons his music unleashes some kind of beast in the listener, a view entirely at odds with the evidence – his run-of-the-mill bleeding heart balladry unleashes mass sing-alongs and teenybop screams. He gleefully reported 12 fainting incidents at the previous night’s show in Aberdeen. Glasgow being Glasgow, this was taken as a challenge.
Yet what followed was ninety minutes of entirely safe pop emoting and some ripe banter about certain areas of the male anatomy and female bodily fluids – thank goodness for the ear defenders on the tots in the audience. Capaldi is a renowned wag, and arguably only he could get away with seguing from, shall we say, natural lubricants to the death of his aunt in one sentence.
Loss and absence loom large in his identikit songs. At least one new track, ‘Leave Me Slowly’, teamed these themes with an attempt at a rock-out by his four-piece band, while another, ‘How I’m Feeling Now’, was stripped back to solo acoustic guitar to match its exposed sentiments on mental health. The stagecraft was nothing to remark on for a show of this size – at least Capaldi can rely on the lusty voices of his audience to fill the space instead.
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