Tom Grennan, O2 Academy, review: authentic magic from the soulful singer-songwriter

Rock stars don’t get smaller than Tom Grennan. This is not to cast aspersions on the chap’s height. Nor on his creative stature – the 25-year-old’s debut album, Lighting Matches, was one of the ten best-selling records of 2018. Instead, it’s an unavoidable consequence of experiencing live music these days: while Grennan was rasping away on stage in Brixton, I was watching him seventy miles away, on my three-inch phone screen, propped against the pepper pot.

The whizzy technology that facilitates this – the MelodyVR app – promises an “immersive live music experience”. It’s the first time the technology has been tried at the O2 Academy, and this is the first live concert at the iconic venue since the pandemic closed its doors.

There is no audience, and the stage and stalls are rigged with cameras. You can switch between video feeds or choose the director’s cut which switches between shots to give the best view. Bar the occasional patch of buffering, the experience was queasily intimate: getting this close to the talent would usually see you hoiked off stage sharpish by security. It doesn’t really approach the sweaty proximity of a real gig; but, for now, it’s probably the best we’ve got.

Grennan, born in Bedford, sprang to stardom in 2017 - having forsaken his hopes of becoming a professional footballer - with the anthemic single Found What I’ve Been Looking For. Still boyish-looking and beardy, he offers a melodic, soulful variant of indie singer-songwriting, with an earnest unpretentiousness well suited to our current moment.

Grennan, born in Bedford, sprang to stardom in 2017 - having forsaken his hopes of becoming a professional footballer - with the anthemic single Found What I’ve Been Looking For. Still boyish-looking and beardy, he offers a melodic, soulful variant of indie singer-songwriting, with an earnest unpretentiousness well suited to our current moment.

The set began strikingly. Just Grennan, his guitar, a single spotlight, and his gorgeously chapped voice unspooling from the dark. He led into Amen, a gospel-spiked single from upcoming album Evering Road, a record inspired by the breakdown of a relationship at the titular Hackney address. “Get out of your chairs, grab a drink,” he encouraged the audience at home, before launching into it with a bluesy, pebbly snarl. The throbbing electronic bass beat and Pentecostal blasts from his backing singers brought a big, stomping energy to proceedings.

The rest of the set tacked between slower, more confessional songs – and triumphant, catchy pop. All Goes Wrong found him pillared in a rotating cylinder of light, like a safe-cracking laser from Mission Impossible. Here Grennan’s voice swooped and shivered. It reminded me of early Tom Waits: the same tender caress of the piano, the same barfly world-weariness. And when, for Something in the Water, he stretched out those notes, tugging and tugging on them as Aretha Franklin did, it was shiversome. Boy, has he got some lungs.

“Let’s have some fun,” Grennan said. “There’s not been a lot of that recently.” It speaks volumes about his performance that, despite everything, it left you grinning. Sashaying across a stage netted with strobes and bludgeoned to his knees by the sheer weight of his music-making: Grennan summoned an authentic Brixton magic. Even if he was all of three inches tall.

Evering Road will be released 5 March via Insanity Records. An accompanying European tour begins April 2021.