He is now a family entertainer: Stormzy at the O2 Arena reviewed

Stormzy occupies a curious place in British pop culture right now. He’s the darling of liberals for all his good deeds – setting up an imprint for black writers within Penguin, and a charity to put black kids through Cambridge. He’s also the figurehead of UK hip hop, which at times has made him a lightning rod for the particular worldview of certain people. ‘Is it asking too much that he show a scintilla of gratitude to the country that offered his mother and him so much? Instead of trashing it,’ wrote, inevitably, Amanda Platell in, inevitably, the Daily Mail, after Stormzy had attacked Theresa May’s government over the Grenfell fire.

You don’t see so much of that sort of coverage these days, and a glance around the O2 showed why. Because the other thing about Stormzy is that he is now a family entertainer. His crowd is not angry youth, clad in hoodies and daring the O2 security by smoking weed.

A couple of rows in front of me sat three unmatching boys of maybe 12 or 13, accompanied by, I guess, the mother of one of them. I was transfixed by the sight – down on the floor near me – of an entire family, mum, dad and two teenage sons, the lads looking troublingly unmortified by being out with both parents. The crowd was mixed in age, sex and race and everything else, and Stormzy treated them as if he were hosting a street party for them, dancing like the world’s most embarrassing uncle, and exclaiming ‘Oh my days!’ between songs as if he were swapping gossip on the front step. The arrival of Ed Sheeran for ‘Own It’ and ‘Take Me Back To London’ upped the family hysteria, and proved that Stormzy’s peers are no longer people he once namechecked, like Wretch 32, but pop royalty.

There was a tension in the show, though, between the R&B ballads and the rapping.