Tinchy Stryder (3/5)
Thursday 18th Feb 10’
Roundhouse, London UK
Once the average age of an artist’s live audience falls below mine, I know it’s time for my music taste to move on. It happened at 16 at an Elliot Minor gig. It happened in 2009 at Reading. And now it’s happened again, at a Tinchy Stryder show. There’s nothing quite as soul destroying as being the eldest (bar a few mummy’s and daddy’s whose children aren’t yet old enough to ride the tube home alone) in a 3000 strong crowd, especially when I’m only 20 myself!
The problem with an audience this young is – they just don’t know how to party. Support act Example (who you have heard of even if you don’t realize it) gave a fun, solid performance and though there were members of the audience who jumped and danced and cheered, they were outnumbered 2-to-1 by kids who just didn’t know how to react to music if they couldn’t sing along to it. Luckily, things picked up when Tinchy finally came on stage, though the audience still lost their energy partway through each song and seemed more interested in using their mobiles to record the show than enjoying the actual performance in front of them.
Tinchy himself lived up to expectations. His voice sounded as good live as on record, he looked comfortable on the stage, and his banter with the audience was at time more enjoyable than his songs. Wearing his statement ‘Star in the Hood’ jewel-studded t-shirt and shades, the rapper brought out guest after guest to perform with (but, not a big fan of his genre I failed to recognize most of them), including the beautiful and very talented Amelle for his encore of ‘Never Leave You’ (unfortunately there was no N-Dubz for his final performance ‘Number 1’).
The background projected behind Tinchy was beautiful to watch and one of the most memorable parts of the night, changing from clips of Tinchy doing his thing to funky coloured shapes and patterns that at times were a little distracting from the man himself. One of my main criticisms however are the mini stops in the songs to allow the audience to sing a certain word or phrase – this is fun once of twice if everyone knows the words very well, but when it happens 5 or 6 times in the same song, or in almost every song it begins to get irritating, especially when the crowd isn’t loud or confident enough to make it effective.
Though I often attend gigs and concert, Tinchy is only the 4th rap / hip hop artists I’ve seen live and despite being light-years ahead of Chipmunk (and only a little behind Ne-Yo) my rating probably shows that, though I did have a fun evening and enjoy Tinchy’s performance, it just doesn’t compare to some of the big name bands I’ve seen over the years. I think this is more a problem with the genre though, where unless the artist really knows how to work the crowd and make them have fun (i.e. Dizzee Rascal) then just watching and listening to the performance is never quite as good as doing the same with the record (something that I’ve found isn’t usually a problem with rock artists).
No comments:
Post a Comment