“Ladies, happy Valentine’s Day,” smiled Chris Brown, ladling on the charm, before rather puncturing the romance of the moment by addressing the gents too: “if you don’t get some p**** at this concert…” Mind you, treating your partner to a V-Day trip to see an R&B star notorious for violently assaulting Rihanna in 2009 might generally be considered a courting faux pas offensive enough to make them spit out their Crunchy Frog.
That Brown returned to London for the first of four nights at the O2 as the third biggest R&B singer of the past decade (after Drake and Rihanna) is arguably cancel culture’s greatest fail to date. But from the moment Brown descended on wires into a neon-heavy show seemingly set in a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk Tiger Tiger, there was certainly a shallowness to proceedings.
