We headed down to the arena to see Scottish sensation Lewis Capaldi on his Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent tour...
Choosing an artist as popular as Raye as the opening act helped the arena to fill up quickly, and with freshly styled hair courtesy of her Nottingham-based hairdresser, she began the set with piano renditions of dance-pop tracks that she has provided vocals for over the years. Following this, she stood up from the piano and began an Amy Winehouse-tinged performance of songs from her upcoming album My 21st Century Blues, complete with a brass band.
Sharing anecdotes from the journey she embarked on to get to this point in her career, after a particularly messy battle with Polydor Records, it was rewarding to see her successfully paving her own path as an independent artist. She will be returning to Nottingham next week for a more intimate show at Rough Trade, and I can’t wait to see a different side to her in a contrasting venue and experience My 21st Century Blues in a live setting following its release.
If Lewis Capaldi couldn’t sing, he’d still be appearing on the same stages, performing to crowds just as large, but as a comedian rather than a musical artist. Since he can in fact sing, the 10,000 people at Motorpoint Arena got a two for one, treated to both a concert and a comedy show at the same time. Despite only playing 13 songs, a relatively small number for an arena show, he was still on stage for around an hour and a half. With the nature of his songs being quite emotional, mostly written about break-ups, his natural humour balanced this out to result in an uplifting evening.
His fans gave him plenty of material to work with, holding various homemade signs baring messages for the singer to read. One simply said ‘I need a big boy’ (a line from a recent SNL skit by SZA that is trending on TikTok) while a fan named Rebecca was called up on stage to take a photo with Lewis after holding up a sign requesting this, explaining that she was attending the gig in remembrance of her friend Jacob, who sadly passed away from cancer last year. Capaldi dedicated the next song, Before You Go, to him.
One fan, passing a cardboard sign and a black Sharpie up to the stage, even managed to get Lewis to draw a tattoo for her, which ended up being a simple line drawing of a cat. You wouldn’t have been blamed for thinking it had been drawn by a toddler when Lewis held it up to the camera to show to the rest of the audience on the large screen. But that’s all part of the risk she took, and it is a more than worthy image to get permanently inscribed on your body for life, based on its backstory.
Capaldi noted that embarking on this tour before the date of the release of his upcoming album Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent perhaps wasn’t the cleverest or most thought out idea, since none of us would know the words to the unreleased songs that he would be performing. But a song from the new album that we did all know the words to was Forget Me; one of his more upbeat numbers, it was the perfect choice to open the show with.
The crowd also knew all the words to Pointless, which appeared in the latter half of the set. Capaldi mumbled that he hates the first two lines of the song (“I bring her coffee in the morning, she brings me inner peace”) moments after singing them, likely a result of the promotional material that he recorded on TikTok to skyrocket the track to number one on the charts. The unreleased title track of the album, Heavenly State of Mind, also went down well with fans, despite everyone previously being unfamiliar with it.
A set change saw Capaldi reappear on top of the box that was used to reveal the stage at the start of the show, a location that he clearly wasn’t the most comfortable in. Even though this didn’t hinder the performance of Bruises or new song Wish You The Best at all, he seemed pretty relieved to return to ground level afterwards, remarking that the combination of wearing white trousers and having IBS probably wasn’t the best mix.
At previous shows on this tour, the encore has begun with How I’m Feeling Now, a song taken from the new album which details Capaldi’s mental health journey. But it was a Friday night, and he told us that he fancied something a bit less heavy, opting instead for a cover of Taylor Swift’s Love Story. The crowd definitely knew the words better than he did, but it was a welcome addition to the set, and got everyone singing along. Probably the closest most of us will get to hearing the song live, with the extortionate prices of Swift’s own tour tickets… but I digress.
Even though Capaldi was booed relentlessly for referring to the crowd as ‘Birmingham’ in the final moments of the show, we couldn’t stay angry for long, as the introduction of Someone You Loved started to play. Lewis got the crowd to repeat the chorus again, and again, and again, and again… but no one was complaining. Even though the song came out back in 2019, it hasn’t lost any of its emotional poignance, and it was the perfect choice to close the night.
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