By the time you’re 20, no one is really judging you on your A-levels any more. But its worth noting that the soulful R&B phenomenon Jorja Smith – playing a sweltering, one-off gig tonight – once wrote an A-level dissertation entitled “Is Postcolonialism Still Present in Grime Music?”
Her defining single of 2016, meanwhile, was a jazzy outing called Beautiful Little Fools, released on International Women’s Day. It was inspired by the role of women in The Great Gatsby, and written while she was still at school.
Tonight, a poet, Thea Gajic, provides the opening lines of one song – Carry Me Home, on which Smith duets with another guest, Maverick Sabre. Here and elsewhere, Smith casually interpolates classical influences into her sultry-but-streetwise tunes. Her voice can butterfly up to a conservatoire soprano and down again to gutsy dancehall-derived sing-talk, all in the same breath.
Up against a world in which R&B singers have become cannon fodder, Smith is clearly nobody’s beautiful little fool. She is already a versatile, fully formed creative, and some of the songs she sings on this humid night in July will make up the most hotly anticipated UK debut album of 2018. You just feel sorry for anyone running against her for any prizes next year.
Many of these songs have already hit the internet in the two years the Walsall native has been operational. Opening track Something in the Way – from 2016’s Project 11 EP – gets arena-sized cheers from a sold-out crowd, as Smith arrives on stage in designer anti-glamour: a ruched burlap ensemble and trainers.
It takes just the opening chord of Where Did I Go to set people off again. Nimble and bittersweet, the song finds Smith’s buffed suede voice catching in all the right places. Her keyboard player Amané Suganami is no slouch either, tickling the ivories with aplomb for the jazz-era soul of the magnificent Beautiful Little Fools itself. “We are all just beautiful little girls/ Playing a game of being fooled,” concludes Smith huskily.
Wise beyond her years? She’s that too. Teenage Fantasy came out earlier this year, although it was – again – written while the precocious Smith was still at school. It’s another instant classic, in which a righteous, puzzled Smith deconstructs young love. “Want it but we can’t have it/ When we got it we don’t seem to want it.” If you shake YouTube hard enough, you can find a sweet early video of Smith covering Katy B’s On a Mission with a schoolmate on guitar.
As far as anyone here is concerned, this singer, who has yet to release her debut album, is already established. As well as regular outings on our own Radios 1 and 1Xtra, Smith had a guest feature on a Kali Uchis tune, and – crucially – appeared twice on Drake’s last UK-guest-heavy release, More Life, exposing her voice to vast global multitudes. In September she will be opening up US arenas for Bruno Mars. Her debut album is said to be in the can. Why, oh why, is Smith sitting on it? Because she has a thing for the number 11 (it is a particularly elegant prime, you have to admit). Our current year would be all wrong, because 2+0+1+8 = 11.
Tabloid speculation has been rife as to the nature and extent of Drake and Smith’s work together. He’s brought her out on stage at his shows and in Birmingham, they popped to the corner shop together for “sweets and tampons” – or so Smith laughed in a recent interview, in which she made the point that when two male artists work together, no one accuses them of playing tongue-hockey.
“I need you all to be a Canadian rapper called Drake,” Smith announces at one point. (Does a ripple go through the men in the audience? It’s hard to tell.) We all oblige by singing Drake’s parts on Get It Together, from More Life. Produced by South African up’n’comer Black Coffee, the song’s Latino-Caribbean vibes cannot help but recall Drake’n’Rihanna hook-ups of the past.
Almost half Smith’s set tonight is made up of tracks that are either brand new or as yet unreleased, but familiar to those who have seen Smith before. Goodbyes is one of the latter – a song that might be about a breakup or a bereavement. “You’re never coming back down,” sings the soulful iteration of Smith. “You belong to the stars and the clouds,” the elegant soprano picks up.
Two other songs seem box-fresh. Lost and Found comes early on, and it is more dreamy, jazzy soul – Smith’s default, perhaps. Later, we get On My Mind, with its roots in UK garage – Birmingham native Preditah produces – in which Smith is British and proud. “Don’t want to feel you,” huffs Smith, “Don’t want you on my mind.”
Wrapping it all up is her breakout tune, Blue Lights. Inspired by Dizzee Rascal’s 2007 tracks Sirens Smith tackles the tendency of young black men to run from police even when they have done nothing wrong. The song aches with hurt. The dreamy Smith wants to turn the blue lights that blight young lives into strobe lights, or fairy lights. “If you’ve done nothing wrong those blue lights should just pass you by,” she sings.
But Smith has perspective too. There’s someone in the song with blood on his hands and they don’t know “where it’s from”. He’d better run, she counsels.
