Little Simz on stage at Manchester’s Co-op Live. Photo: Mike Gray/Avalon.Red
Co-op Live, Manchester, 16 October
*****
Little Simz is the perfect fit for the Nerve’s first live music review. She’s playing her biggest UK shows this week – last night in Manchester, tonight in London at The O2, before a North American tour later this month – following the kind of period that can either break you or make you unstoppable. There have been artistic triumphs. But also personal reckonings and score-settling.
Over the past decade, the north Londoner has steadily taken her time on the ring road to national treasure. She crossed over to the mainstream without a major label, won Brits, Mobos, the Mercury Music Prize and an Ivor Novello, scored top five albums, a Glastonbury Pyramid Stage slot, a role in Netflix’s Top Boy and a US-breaking single with Coldplay. But she’s approached these milestones with the laser focus of a top athlete, pushing the scope far beyond any UK rapper of her generation.
In June, she curated the Southbank Centre’s Meltdown festival – a top tier job usually reserved for legends like Chaka Khan and Grace Jones – and headlined with an orchestra. This year she also starred in a major film opposite Cillian Murphy (Steve) and released her sixth studio album. But at the start of the year, Simz filed a lawsuit against Inflo, aka Dean Josiah Cover, the producer of her previous three albums, for alleged unpaid loans to the tune of £1.7m. She’s known Cover since she was a kid; his partner, Cleo Sol, is the soulful voice on some of her biggest songs. Together, they’re co-conspirators in the celebrated band SAULT. The fallout came as a shock to her fans. Simz reportedly scrapped the next four albums she was working on to follow 2022’s No Thank You, citing a crisis of confidence. But despite nearly hanging up her microphone, she came out guns blazing in June with the album Lotus - a reference to “one of the only flowers that thrive in muddy waters” - reaching UK #3. Never one to mince her words, it opened with a track called Thief.
Revenge, however, is a dish best served live. Simz has risen to the challenge of her first headline arena show. She opens with a foreboding trio from Lotus – Hollow, Thief and Flood – that speak to resilience, self-reliance and moving past betrayal, with barbs like “I’m lucky that I got out now, it’s a shame I really feel sorry for your wife”. Swaggering onstage in a green reflective tracksuit, hood up, Prada shades on, Simz is reminiscent of Manchester’s golden boy, Liam Gallagher, minus the tambourine hat. She’s flanked by four punchy young players decked out in black leathers as though they’re in the Matrix and hammering it like they’re a nu-metal band, cocooned within a lotus-shaped backdrop.
But while it starts off with the heft of a rock show, tonight is a masterclass in – as Simz says in Flood – “being as free as I can”. Undoubtedly, Inflo helped fine-tune the distinctive alt-soul and afrobeat-inspired sound Simz has become known for, but her new material draws us deeper into her stylistic diversity: jazz, punk-funk, trip-hop, Britpop. She represents the full scope of “a Black British female”, according to the actor Michaela Coel. And she is a playful and generous performer: new track Young has been likened to a boom-bap Parklife, but there’s also the cheek of Madness, as Simz strides up and down resembling the Artful Dodger in baggy trousers. Her musical landscape could be anything, but Simz is the landmark.
Another secret weapon, Only, draws on Brazilian rhythms like bossa nova. And there’s take-it-to-the-church drama when she sings her Sometimes I Might Be Introvert theme, boosted by flames and holy smoke (dry ice). Cheers ring out when she swaps Introvert’s apartheid lyric for “genocide”. The sombre moments are few, however – Simz, as she reminds us often, wants us to party. In an unexpected interlude, she rises through the stage behind some decks for a medley of thunderous baile funk and Jersey club from her Drop 7 EP, where she raps in Portuguese. Continuing the cross-cultural rhythms, Simz MCs over a new turbo-charged dance track where she is joined by British-Nigerian alté singer Deela.
It’s the only guest appearance, despite Lotus boasting her biggest-yet crew of cameos, including Sampha, Michael Kiwanuka and frequent collaborator Obongjayar. But there are enough shifts in pace and mood tonight without them. It’s made abundantly clear that Simz is self-sufficient: she delivers a Busta Rhymes-level tongue-twister on Venom, she DJs, dances, she has the bangers (Lion, Woman, Two Worlds Apart and Point And Kill get huge crowd reactions) and picks up an acoustic guitar for the new album’s title track (though the intimacy is overshadowed somewhat by a beefy drum solo).
In another flash of vulnerability, Simz stops the music to address the arena about how difficult it was to make Lotus – the self-doubt (“I couldn’t trust my voice”) and the insecurity (“I didn’t know what people would like”). But she turns it into words of motivation. “I just want to encourage you all to finish what you start,” she says, before beginning her rawest song, Lonely. “Just try and see that project through because you never know what it could be.”
The introspection doesn’t last long. It wouldn’t be a Simz show without some braggadocio to sign off: Gorilla, with its bolshy horn instrumental that you can hear people whistling on their way home, and lyrical admonition that her “art will be timeless, I don't do limits”. She tees it up with a reminder of how far she’s come. “I used to play small shows here to maybe 100 people,” she says. “I don’t take none of this shit for granted.”
Little Simz plays 02 Arena, London tonight and then tours Canada and North America