Damiano David is struggling. “Now is the hardest part of the show when I have to talk,” the Maneskin frontman turned solo star sighs. “I sound like fucking Daffy Duck”. David might have a touch of the sniffles, but aside from his repeated mentions, you wouldn’t know: the impressive vocals that helped propel his band from Eurovision curiosities to a full-on stadium-selling global phenomenon are still holding up just fine.
In fact, these more off the cuff moments are a helpful reset in cutting through the slightly odd framing of it all. When the vocalist continues into his following speech, it’s to deliver a monologue about losing and finding himself, all whilst inexplicably changing his top on stage from a clothes rail that’s been purposefully wheeled on for the occasion. “This record made me understand what was wrong, my life was perfect but it was someone else’s idea of perfection,” he declares whilst dramatically putting the vest he’d previously disrobed with a flourish back on. The crowd’s idea of perfection will clearly have to stay clothed for the next few songs at least.
Tonight’s show, he tells us, is structured to reflect this narrative of high-octane sudden success, internal crisis, and subsequent rediscovery and redemption. Presumably, his shirtless cover of Kings of Leon’s Sex On Fire is - in the absence of any Maneskin songs - designed to represent his rockstar peak; a subsequent melancholy take on Mark Ronson and Miley Cyrus’ Nothing Breaks Like A Heart two songs later, his self-questioning retreat. It’s not a plotline that’s primed for a Hollywood adaption quite yet, but the voracious crowd couldn’t care less. And rather than merely a side project from his main outfit, it’s obvious that David's solo material has carved out its own space and fandom from that of his leather-clad early days.
Largely landing in a Harry Styles-esque bracket of big, sparkling hooks, his solo material is proudly pop - from the bombastic earworm of opener Born With A Broken Heart through the stadium-sized soar of follow-up The First Time. It’s all hugely radio-friendly, albeit it without a particularly individual point of view; instead, it’s when David goes more off-piste on the lilting ‘50s swoons of Tangerine or the fancy footwork of Tango that you can see a more tangible solo identity creeping in. He’s admirably honest about the process. “I understood I wanted to give myself the chance to experiment as much as possible,” he says of recent debut solo album Funny Little Fears, “not to enclose myself in one version of myself.” A completely reasonable point from a still-young artist, although one that he then immediately undermines by playing The First Time for the second time in the night.
It’s slightly baffling choices like this that make Damiano David’s live show feel somewhat disjointed. On the surface, it’s a big glitzy spectacular - its production, centred around the singer’s name in enormous flashing lights, far outsized for the relatively small size of the Roundhouse. At other moments, it feels firmly like a work in progress. “I have to talk because we’re having technical problems, but I don’t really have anything to talk about,” he admits before Sick Of Myself. Even with a head cold, you’d hope that someone at his level could style it out a little better.
Still, David looks and sounds like the sort of pop star even AI couldn’t generate. The queue of fans that stretched through Camden ahead of the show tonight clearly agree. Once David has done experimenting, there’s a lot of potential for him to land on something truly interesting.
