Raye glides her voice up an octave or two a cappella, then rattles off a melisma almost as an afterthought. The south London singer-songwriter holds a note for what seems an impossibly long time. Soon after, she fusses about her hair and explains how if she’s fiddling around under her skirt, she’s just adjusting a sweaty mic pack. Raye asks the crowd for clemency if a nipple pops out of her corset dress. “There are some great photo-editing apps,” she jokes.
The night’s theme is, apparently, honesty, and Rachel Keen is the kind of glamorous pop star who, like Adele before her, shrinks the room by gassing about nerdy detail or confiding secrets of the trade. She is particularly delighted with the power she wields over Matt Brooks, her drummer, who is obliged to bring percussion crashing down every time she raises and lowers an arm. “I could be scratching my head! Or doing ballet!” she notes, hand above her head. “Pauly’s so patient with me,” she adds, about guitarist Paul Murray, the band leader. She gestures, and down come the entire band, dramatically and on point.
Raye’s set list is front-loaded with candour too. Most tracks tonight find Keen contextualising vivid emotional flashpoints in her recent life. Her frustration at the music industry is exorcised in the pithy Hard Out Here. The song Body Dysmorphia isn’t a bid for compliments, she confides; external reassurance rarely makes a dent in the condition.
Most pin-drop of all is the discussion around the raw Ice Cream Man, which recalls a sexual assault at the hands of a producer. The word “rape” hangs heavy in the room. It’s sad, she concludes, that women are ashamed to name the thing that happened to them when shame belongs to the perpetrator.
Part group therapy, part retro jazz-pop showcase – the band, complete with a horn section, are in white suits with dickie bows – this leg of Raye’s My 21st Century Blues tour feels like a very bespoke victory lap. If revenge is a dish best served cold, her vindication has already spanned many courses.
“I’m done being a polite pop star,” she tweeted in 2021. Tied to a major-label record contract that did not serve her interests, Raye’s elastic guest vocals made her a successful featured artist on dance-pop hits – not least You Don’t Know Me with Jax Jones from 2017. She plays it with bittersweet duty tonight.
Her songwriting nous, meanwhile, was employed in the service of other artists – most starry among them Beyoncé. (Raye co-wrote Bigger on The Lion King soundtrack.) Although sections of a nine-track EP, Euphoric Sad Songs (2020) established the emotive appeal of her solo work – tonight we get Natalie Don’t, Raye’s update of Dolly Parton’s Jolene from that record – Polydor continued to stall her debut album. Raye is no lone example of this gilded indentured servitude, chasing chart positions by any genre necessary; the path from development act to a bona fide artist often takes years. Even then, women sometimes take matters into their own hands. Charli XCX dipped warily in and out of the mainstream for years. Having won success with Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, Little Simz sacked her manager in 2022. (The counter-argument is that rushing a new artist to market prematurely might lead to dropping them abruptly if they don’t hit.)
Raye felt Polydor were “sitting on diamonds”, as she sings on Hard Out Here. So she broke up with them in public, went independent, and soon scored a No 1 single, Escapism, a terrific song about partying to numb the pain of lost love. Her 2023 debut album, My 21st Century Blues – about being muzzled by record execs, her own self-medication and more gritty fare besides – followed. It drew justified comparisons to Amy Winehouse thanks to Raye’s carpet-burn realness and her jazz, hip-hop and R&B cadences. It reached No 2 in the charts. Last year, she headlined London’s Royal Albert Hall with an orchestra and a gospel choir.
A year on from her album release, it feels as if Raye’s vindication banquet is being followed not only by a cheese course but dessert wine, chocolate bonbons and a digestif. My 21st Century Blues garnered a record seven Brit nominations. Seeing how many she leaves with will be a big ceremony draw 2 March.
Rescheduled from December, when Raye was ordered to rest her voice, this short UK tour builds towards a date at the O2 in London in March, where she will reprise her orchestral performance, this time for 20,000 people. Tickets apparently sold out in under an hour.
This, then, is what it sounds like when someone is having their bonbons and savouring every bite. Mid-gig, sans band, Raye goes to the piano to skip through fan requests for pre-album tunes, confessing to being a bit embarrassed about some of them. There are baggier sections too. Perhaps Buss It Down, where Raye conducts the audience’s three-part vocals, goes on a little too long. Having kissed inane dance tracks goodbye, it’s a mystery why she should be involved in a bling-flexing exercise: Prada, with Cassö and D-Block Europe (she performs it solo).
Ultimately, these riddles and longueurs are balanced by a surfeit of actual bangers – such as Black Mascara, a heartbreak tune delivered as joyous club fare tonight. The evening’s highlights find Raye leaning hard into her woman-scorned persona. “No weapon formed against me shall ever prosper,” she thunders on Hard Out Here. It all climaxes with Escapism, in which her misery is visceral and her band heavy. Vengeance is – still – hers.
