We should all be used to unusual gigs by now. Tonight’s performance, however, finds the UK’s poet laureate Simon Armitage pacing the stage, declaiming about the state of human nature; it sees left-field rapper Kojey Radical clad in sky-coloured velour, anatomising the difference between value and worth. Naturally, we’re in a multistorey car park in Peckham, south London – a venue called Bold Tendencies – perched on socially distanced plastic chairs.
The mild-mannered British super-producer holding the evening together – Fraser T Smith, currently trading as Future Utopia – is smiling, encased inside a sculpture, Noise Matrix, made of brightly coloured pipework. Noise Matrix represents the discordant waveforms of human-generated noise; it’s by Smith’s partner, the artist Sarah Thorneycroft-Smith.
“To show mercy once in a blue moon only makes the unforgiving more furious,” Armitage seethes quietly over a track called Do We Really Care Pt 2. “How much is enough if too much is never enough?” wonders Radical later, lolloping around, the clear alpha in the room.
For an evening mostly about discord – about human division, about how freedom might only exist in the mind, and how any sort of utopia might be achieved given these odds – it all passes matter-of-factly, subdued by the intimate nature of the evening (214 seats). And if the atmosphere is often thought-provoking, this early set (there’s another later) still exists very much within the realms of the entertainment industry, of which Smith is now a major constituent part.
Flash back to 2018. On his way to collect his best album Brit award for 2017’s Gang Signs & Prayer, the rapper Stormzy – all 6ft 5in of him – bear-hugged a diminutive white guy in a suit before taking the stage. That was Smith. A year previously, Stormzy’s 2017 mega-hit Blinded By Your Grace Pt 2 devoted more time than most other pop stars acknowledging the man pushing the faders. “One round of applause,” it went, “One time for Fraser T Smith on the chords.”
Flash forward to last year: Smith released his own album, Future Utopia’s 12 Questions, the debut solo outing for a hitherto back-room operative. He also played piano on Black, the standout anthem by rapper Dave, at the Brits. Stormzy and Dave were two of the many guests on 12 Questions, alongside Radical and Armitage. The great and the good of grime – including rapper Kano – lined up because Smith, a nicely spoken Buckinghamshire-born 50-year-old, had also been instrumental in their successes. In the past decade, he has effectively overseen the transition of grime from Cinderella genre to mainstream domination, helping bulldoze the gates to the academy on behalf of Britain’s most marginalised artists.
Smith could easily have made a showreel of a solo record – greeted, perhaps, with the muted applause that met super-producer Paul “Adele” Epworth’s own 2020 album. Instead, he grappled with the world’s ills, foregrounding performance poets, former Black Panthers and hot new talents such as Arlo Parks and Easy Life. These were dialectics masquerading as an off-duty dance record. Tonight, the (recorded) passages involving Albert Woodfox, who spent 40 years in solitary confinement, remain some of the most arresting bits of audio out there. And if the overarching vibe can occasionally feel something like U2 crossed with Gorillaz, Smith’s time is not wasted – and neither is ours.
His surround sound rig is expensive-sounding; the car park’s compostable toilets are like a madeleine for all the cancelled festivals. The elephant in the room tonight is the fact that none of the big beasts appear live. A few appear as samples – not least the actor Idris Elba, who intones “fear kills everything it touches” on Fear Or Faith? Pt 2. (The words themselves come from the 2018 book The Secret DJ, an analysis of human frailty disguised as a dance music exposé.)
But much of the time we’re watching Smith as just another electronic musician, triggering, looping and playing drum pads. You have to view anything a very rich producer suggests about money with some wariness, but it’s Easy Life’s singer Murray Matravers, sparring with Kojey Radical on Million$Bill, who delivers one of the evening’s most joyous outpourings. Over a soul sample, the two men weigh up having all the money in the world. In Matravers’s fantasy, he burns it – and gets revenge. “Set fire to the sports cars at the office,” he yells, “Replace the water in the filter for some chronic! Canary Wharf all screaming, ‘Fuck the bosses!’” What is utopia, after all, if not a dream?
