“I’m quite literally s****ing my pants right now,” says Lewis Capaldi, slipping easily into his amenable onstage persona as part male Adele, part Scottish club try-out comedian having his first go at crowd work.
Capaldi’s music, let’s be frank, is pretty unremarkable standard issue singer-songwriter big balladry, of the type that used to make your nan weep to David Gray. But his image, as the normal lad down the pub who happens to be blessed with Krakatoa tonsils, makes him a particularly huggable presence, and gives lyrics that might otherwise sound like they were culled from an AI version of 19 – “Nobody said that this would last forever”, “I wanna say I wish that you never left, but instead I only wish you the best” – a believability that you wouldn’t get from a heartbreak ballad by, say, Louis Tomlinson.
