Miguel’s promo team has been at work outside XOYO, spray-painting the pavement with the title of his new album, Wildheart, and bringing in a van dispensing free coffee. By sheer coincidence, Miguel’s current single is called Coffee, and a few dozen people have seized the chance to connect with him in the time-honoured way: by sipping latte from a paper cup imprinted with his face.
You wouldn’t have pegged the 29-year-old Los Angeleno as a java man. Cognac, certainly; perhaps – bearing in mind his layers of art-studentish beads and scarves – absinthe. Coffee, though, doesn’t jibe with his gluey electro-funk. From start to no-encore finish, this show – his only UK stop – cocoons us in intimate soul that’s been chopped and psychedelically screwed.
As per his rapturously received last album, Kaleidoscope Dream, he’s a student of Prince and George Clinton, and of Frank Ocean’s hazy synth-funk. He and his band, packed on to a stage almost big enough to contain all five members, go on lengthy sonic excursions; during Sure Thing, he croonily elongates a list of inventive sex-analogies (“If you be the cash, I’ll be the rubber band”) for about 10 minutes.
He’s a fine vocalist, and he knows it, whipping out a wild, sweet falsetto on the smash hit Adorn with exactly the same ease as he sustains a startling, Rob Halfordesque wail on Sure Thing. But he offers more than just sterling technique and a lyric book that veers from the Thrill’s literate description of a lads’ night out to Coffee’s hip archness (“We talk street-art and sarcasm”).
Miguel is concocting his own anti-establishment cult, the Wildhearts, and spends rather a lot of time exhorting us, in his affable way, to rebel against “what’s socially acceptable”. “He’s deep,” says one woman, unimpressed and sarcastic, but she’s in the minority. His sincerity speaks to people, and here’s betting that he and Wildheart will be among 2015’s major successes.
