“Manchester, are you ready to cause some carnage?” asks Tyron Frampton, AKA Slowthai. Rapper and audience alike have waited a year for him to tour his No 1 second album, Tyron, and soon turn the space into a sea of air-punching and rap-a-longs, although it’s a challenge to get near the 27-year-old’s trademark part-gruff, part-jittery delivery.
His raw, unfiltered energy tipped into leery behaviour at the 2020 NME awards (referenced on Cancelled) which he will have learned from, but here he is every inch the roguish scamp with an audience eating from his hand. “The Guardian are here reviewing us,” he sniggers, momentarily turning this publication into pantomime villain. “Let’s give them a real review.”
He’s as good as his word, packing 25 tracks into 80 minutes. The presentation – Slowthai in silhouette against either dazzling screens or blow-ups of his grinning fizzog, metal teeth’n’all – is Bez goofiness-meets-Blair Witch Project. There are walls of pyrotechnics and he divides the crowd into circle pits or halves, but for all the showmanship, there’s something deeply real about Frampton (background: Northampton council estate, teenage mum, hugely affected by the death of his baby brother). He seems to genuinely panic as he loses his setlist in the mayhem, but turns the incident to his advantage, teasing a strong-sounding new song. Otherwise, material from Tyron and 2019’s Top 10 debut, Nothing Great About Britain, ranges from hard-hitting, melodically pretty (the soulful I Tried) to herbert punk (Doorman), political to emotional.
He can be bleakly funny: “Now I’ve got a son. I’ve got a fuckin’ HARSE!” he yells, and while the audience silently “aww” he delivers the punchline, “The thing I can’t find is a drug dealer”, to introduce, well, Drug Dealer. He can be weirdly touching, warmly hugging female rapper Deb Never (who duets on Push) or revealing that he was always told he’d never amount to anything “so doing this makes me tear up”. He is succeeding by being himself, and people love him for it.
• At City Hall, Newcastle, tonight, then touring
