The heat death theory of the end of the universe suggests that trillions of years of entropy will leave the cosmos a vast, frozen wasteland of indistinguishable particles. Nights like tonight augur a similar fate for pop culture: a Brits Week charity show by the latest white retro blues and soul singer who has been handed instant chart success by winning the Brits critics’ choice award, a vehicle for major labels to garner this year’s formulaic high-priority cash cow a facade of critical respect. Sussex soulman Rag’n’Bone Man – AKA Rory Graham – can’t even say that his biker pub doorman image is breaking any moulds. He resembles the Russian nesting doll that the Brits pulled Jack Garratt out of last year.
He takes to the stage solo wearing a colour-blindness test of a T-shirt because “someone spilled rum” on his favoured stagewear, and delivers a stark, impassioned blues take on bluegrass standard Reuben’s Train. Rag’n’Bone Man has a fantastic voice but, in truth, Graham’s gritted-honey vocals smack as much of Michael Bolton as Ben E King, and he rarely belts it out as powerfully as you might expect.
As his band kick in on Wolves and Ego they leave him muted and restrained, grooving gently around the stage to pedestrian mainstream soul and living up to the latter’s line “I know my gospel but I ain’t a preacher”. It’s his base tone – straight-bat retro-soul spirituals with occasional lounge rap interludes, stripped of the modernist crackles of his records and sung in a style that The X Factor has beaten into a generation as the way that good singers sing. Be a Man could have fallen off Phil Collins’ But Seriously…, while Guilty is Clapton’s idea of the blues. Graham seems genuinely proud to have co-written the unremarkable Your Way with the unremarkable Jamie Lidell, or serial-killer suicide lament Lay My Body Down with Dan Smith from Bastille. It all adds up to a new faux-leftfield cult of the ordinary. No wonder Elton’s already been on the blower.
When Graham strips the band away and sings “miserable songs” accompanied by haunting piano, though, he stops looking like he’s about to be knocked out of The Voice in the battle rounds and his voice billows, wielded with a mastery that eluded other recent critics’ choices such as Garrett, Smith and that one in the hat. Odetta is a touching ode to a friend’s newborn and his acoustic take on new single Skin received such hushed attention you could hear someone’s knuckles crack. His big, brooding hit Human, a steamy gospel Hulk of a tune, impresses too, but as Graham’s debut album outsells the rest of the Top 20 put together, it comes with a background whimper of some distant, more interesting musical galaxy disintegrating.
