An artist who began her career singing backup vocals for Rudimental as a teenager, Olivia Dean landed exactly where she’s supposed to be last night: front and centre, and headlining the first of three sold-out nights at Hammersmith’s Eventim Apollo.
The 25-year-old north Londoner opened her set as a mere silhouette, hidden by a flower-painted canvas, to the sound of UFO, the first single from her debut album Messy.
Since the release of her album less than a year ago, Dean’s rise has been stratospheric. Within 12 months, she’s leapt from rising Brit school graduate to Mercury Prize-nominated, Coachella-storming, superstar in waiting.
She shares the same, London-specific, mischievous charm as Raye and Adele, and as a result, her gigs often feel like your best friend has had one drink too many and climbed on stage. As the curtain lifted and she launched into 2019 single OK Love You Bye, she raised her pint to the audience with a wink and a ‘cheers’.
By her third number Echo, the audience was roaring along to every lyric. Dean’s soulful, jazz-infused ballads are not the type to stand and sway to, but to move to, cry to and most importantly, sing to – whether you’re in the shower, the car, or simply feel like exercising your lungs.
Witnessing this at an Olivia Dean gig felt like watching a choir of 5000 people, which only got louder with tracks such as Cross My Mind and Be My Own Boyfriend.
What makes her shows excellent – aside from Dean having the stage presence of someone who's been doing it for 20 years – is the unspoken, shared understanding that everyone present has leant on her music to get over something or someone.
Her breakup anthems are as healing as they are crushing. Take tracks The Hardest Part and What Am I Gonna Do on Sundays? for example: there may not have been a dry eye in the room, yet somehow bellowing from the pit of your stomach can leave you feeling fuller.
Before closing the show with popular single Dive, to top off the 90-minute journey of heartache and remedy, Dean took us on one final, therapeutic, detour to pay tribute to our grandparents – as she does in the last song on her album, Carmen. “This is for my granny and for yours,” she said, as the rest of us reached for the tissues.
As the night came to a close, the crowds of scrunchie-wearing Gen Z women emerged biblically into rainfall. You could call it a baptism of sorts – or you could call it Hammersmith on a Thursday night. Though interestingly, the price of one therapy session will cost you the same as two tickets to Olivia Dean.
