Millennium Music Hall, Cardiff
Sun 1 May
★★★★☆
words: NOEL GARDNER
This is the third day of Katy B’s first ever headline tour and she’s probably more excited about it than we, the audience, are. That’s not idle pretend mind-reading, by the way, that’s what she tells us after her opening song this evening – Louder, which people barrel straight into in terms of hands-aloft dancing despite it not even being on her debut album On A Mission. Man, folks got a lot of love for Katherine Brien round here – likewise everywhere else she’s visiting around now in the UK, each date being sold out.
Folks have had ample time for their love to marinate, too: this tour was booked in December, with 2011 seeing Katy’s audience mushroom. Circa the August 2010 release of Katy On A Mission, her debut solo single, she was on a slightly awkward cusp between being a sugar-voiced mouthpiece for garage/UK funky producers like Geeneus and DJ NG, and a pop icon in her own right. Several months on, it’s clear that she belongs in the latter camp. The audience for tonight is heavily teenaged, maybe 60% female and screams at the end of songs; without wishing to judge on appearance, I’m also guessing that not many of them came to Katy via her association with London’s significant pirate-gone-legit station Rinse FM. (A couple of Rinse DJs play a club night at Clwb Ifor Bach straight after this show, billed loosely as an ‘afterparty’ – there appears to be limited movement from one to the other.)
All of which means that Katy B has the crowd in the palm of her hand, which must be what the Nemesis ride at Alton Towers is like, given the regularity with which she throws her arms into the air cheerleadingly. Her ethos is purely crowdpleasing, though: the aforementioned non-album opener aside, her and her band follow it up with recent single Broken Record, one of her more explicitly ‘pop’ turns. Power On Me and Movement, up next, will probably remain album tracks, but seeing them performed live cements something that might have eluded you if you’ve only been bumping this album home alone: pretty much every single Katy B song has a chorus that is built, and expertly tweaked, for mass singalongs. For Witches’ Brew and Katy On A Mission, we even get to sing half the chorus ourselves. The only exception, Disappear (possibly this reviewer’s favourite track on the album), necessarily has to lose its subtleties, and the bold brass which fills the gaps doesn’t quite do it justice.
To compensate, Easy Please Me – in which the weary-before-her-time 21-year-old tires of men and all their foibles – has a snap to it that makes Katy sound voracious, rather than resigned. This might be due to it being preceded by an observation about London builders cracking open the wolfwhistles as soon as the sun comes out, which as ‘banter’ goes is preferable to her MC shouting “CARDIFF ARE YOU BETTER THAN BRISTOL???” five times until enough people have affirmed this tenuous cross-border rivalry. Then she skulks behind a curtain for 30 seconds, the band (who don’t at all exhume the naffest clichés of ‘dance music played live’, and in the case of the drummer can actually lay down a killer garage beat) rev into Lights On, Katy pops back, more singalongability is had, and then the lights are switched symbolically on.
Pretty sure Katy and on-record co-vocalist Ms Dynamite were thinking of around 4am rather than 10.45pm when they penned these evocative lyrics about wanting to carry on raving as a club powers down, but the atmosphere is excitable enough for the feeling to transfer. Moreover, these songs are good enough to make people’s excitement justified, and Katy B is a great pop star in a ‘basically like you, but really good at singing’ kind of way.
