Nine dates into a UK/EU tour promoting his fifth album Memory Morning, melancholic house maestro Tourist brought his concise, one-man show to Nottingham's Rescue Rooms, closing out the UK’s hottest day yet with some summery, electronic vibes...
Today, many electronic music artists prioritise getting people dancing without thinking too much over, conveying emotion. For South London born musician Tourist, however, dance and emotion are both two sides of the same coin.
It’s an ethos that serves him well when he appears onstage at Rescue Rooms on the ninth date of touring his fifth album Memory Morning through the EU and UK. He opens the set not with two fast, club-ready tunes but with two slower and more contemplative tracks: Ithaca and Emily. He also doesn’t reconstruct these tracks with DJ decks, like your average dance music producer, but instead with a hefty sampler/launchpad board with which he speeds tracks up, slows them-down, switches parts out, adds extra drums, pads and effects and keeps everyone on their toes through an hour-and-a-half of nearly non-stop music.
It’s the calling-card of an artist whose skills lie at a unique spot between dance music production and deeply emotional song-writing. As the co-writer of Sam Smith’s Grammy-winning 2015 hit Stay with Me as well as popular tunes by Jessie Ware, Lapsley and Avicii, Tourist clearly understands what makes a solid, verse-chorus-bridge pop song. For most of his career however, he’s sought to translate that skill into analogue synths, beats and sampling, standing on the fringes of the underground while transmitting ideas, emotions and vibes to mainstream dance. Truthfully, long before Fred Again’s melancholic house songs went mainstream in 2022, there was Tourist, who since 2012 has made his name as the understated yet tried-and-true master of making people cry on the dancefloor.
But to boil it down, a Tourist show isn’t too much more than a streamlined, no-bull dance music gig and an excellent one at that. There’s no messing around. Tourist, a handsome dude unassumingly dressed in a black tracksuit, dances solemnly onstage and keeps the beat going, operating his samplers with a fiercely concentrated gaze. It's the look of a man 12 years into the game who knows exactly the kind of party he's bringing to Nottingham and with an irrepressible determination to make it happen.
Memory Morning highlight EST sees him extend the build-up, adding layer upon layer of lavish synths before in the drop he shakes the room with the sound of skittering drums and stuttered vocal samples. We then dance harder during Little Bit Further. The Mark Fry vocal sample ("march on my brother, go a little bit further") tugs on the heart-strings and builds suspense for a little longer than the studio-version, before the drop and the fast beat and electrifying synth-chords that shake the very soul.
Further on (see what I did?) both music and visuals get more intense and psychedelic. During the Big-Thief-sampling Your Love (possibly the best Tourist song) the track’s music video, mysteriously depicting a man on fire, plays behind Tourist onstage. As the emotional centrepiece of his grief-themed 2022 album Inside Out, Your Love is a compelling tune on record but heard live it’s something almost entirely different. The lead synth for example, sounds echoey, distorted and totally relentless, evoking ocean tides and waves and while feeling the pulsing house beat shake your bones and hearing the stirring "your love!" sample you can’t help but dance. Then, before you know it, he’s mixed straight into Memory Morning single Valentine and 2016 club banger Run. Both tracks envelop you with sparkly washes of progressive house noise, dipping and sweeping up into crescendos and feeling as if they’ll go on forever in the best way. The whole three song run is nothing if not an immersive experience.
Towards the end of the night, Tourist grins at the “one more song” chants and says that he’s grateful to all of us before he closes the gig with the catchy but slow, We Stayed up All Night, a collab with singer Ardyn. It’s a poignant end, bringing the energy down and giving the crowd a song to which we can sway rather than jump. The simple lyrics: "you know we’re young, got time for fun" stick with me even as I stay behind for a quick boogey as Rescue Rooms turns into a club, after the gig.
It’s a cliché but that was, in short, my takeaway from the gig: when life gets hard (coupled with me locked down by a master’s degree and looking for a job) it’s more important than ever to dance, be introspective and remember that things turn out okay.
Main photo: James Lyndsay
Tourist performed at Rescue Rooms on 11th May 2024.
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