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Burna Boy, O2 Brixton, review: these dreary live streams even make Nigeria's giant look small

Not the stage he's used to: Burna Boy - Amari James 
Not the stage he's used to: Burna Boy - Amari James

Usually, one of the best things about going to a concert is that it provides a few hours’ respite from staring into a screen. But this is 2020, and in 2020 we attend gigs on our smartphones.

The coronavirus, a year old this week, has effectively obliterated the live music industry. According to yesterday’s report by collecting society PRS for Music, live music contributed £1.3 billion to the UK economy in 2019. This was a sizeable chunk of the £5.8 billion total that the music industry as a whole brought in, and a figure that was projected to keep growing until Covid-19 arrived. Instead, the industry is facing severe losses, with musicians expected to lose two-thirds of their income amid a financial black hole that’s projected to amount to more than £3 billion.

Premium livestreamed shows are the latest proposed solution. The management for former One Direction member Niall Horan recently bragged of packing 125,000 virtual attendees into the vacant Royal Albert Hall. With tickets for that show going at £16 a pop, it made for a pretty pay day. But with such gloomy times ahead, it doesn’t help that our most advanced substitute for the live experience aimed at recouping the industry’s losses – a string of ticketed gigs streamed live from Brixton’s O2 Academy via immersive virtual reality app MelodyVR – is so disappointing.

Even Burna Boy – one of the biggest names in global pop music, and one of its most energetic live performers to boot – couldn’t make it zing as he took to the stage at Brixton Academy last night, the first show in a short run at the venue that will feature Liam Gallagher and Kaiser Chiefs in the coming weeks.

The 29-year-old Nigerian singer, born Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu Rex, is a megastar in his home country and enjoying a rapidly growing following in the UK too, last year selling out Wembley Arena. His grandfather, Benson Idonije, was Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti’s first manager and Burna Boy channels the Nigerian icon’s electric pomp as well as his pan-African activism. Recent collaborators include Ed Sheeran, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, and Stormzy, though none are able to join him onstage in Brixton. Instead he performs solo, drawing from his extensive catalogue of peppy, often political Afrobeats hits.

Burna Boy at the O2 Brixton - Amari James 
Burna Boy at the O2 Brixton - Amari James

“I’ve never performed like this before, with no people, just cameras,” he says more than an hour into the show, breaking through the awkwardness of the situation with a chuckle, “but I suppose it’s better than nothing. We’re making the best of the situation.”

By that point, Burna Boy had coasted through 22 of his best-known songs in a set dominated by tracks from 2019’s Grammy-nominated African Giant LP and this summer’s Twice As Tall. With no crowd to interact with, he skipped from song to song with little pause; and aside from occasional flirtation with the 360-degree cameras, this felt more like a stage rehearsal than the real thing. Given how far performing to an empty Brixton Academy must feel from the ‘real thing’, it’s hard to blame him. Tracks like Killin Dem or Ye would typically send tens of thousands of people into raptures. Hearing them echoed back from 1920s architraves rather than adoring masses is a sensation Burna Boy clearly isn’t used to.

There’s no doubting his talents: a voice as rich and smooth as butter, and dance moves that have spawned countless imitators. But in the cavernous environs of this empty Brixton hall, even Burna Boy’s usually enormous stage presence feels small. When the lights go down and the audience is returned to the home screen, all that’s left is the wish for things to go back to how they once were.