Dean Blunt at the Sugar Club

It’s Saturday night at a half-empty Sugar Club: a ten-minute long sample of heavy rain fades out and a spotlight shines centre-stage, breaking the complete darkness and illuminating the figure of Dean Blunt, dressed all in black. He wears a baseball cap low over his eyes, his hands firmly rooted in his pockets. Behind him is a man with a neck the size of a tractor tyre, wearing a Nation of Islam suit and shirt. He appears to be Blunt’s bodyguard, remains standing silently behind the performer for the remainder of the gig. It looks like an open-mic night at a high-security prison, and at times sounds like it too.

Blunt performs songs from his 2013 album ‘The Redeemer,’ and its companion piece ‘Stone Island,’ the latter self-released that same year via Russian music site Afisha. Both albums mark a departure for Blunt, away from the scrambled pop and moth-eaten vocals of Hype Williams (his previous incarnation with collaborator Inga Copeland), toward a sound that twins unprocessed crooning with an array of fake-gold pre-programmed strings.

There was always a sense of insincerity about Hype Williams, from the faceless scuzz of their musical offerings, to their propagation of wildly fictitious origin myths: in interviews Blunt claimed variously to be a former boxer, to hate hip-hop, and to have met Copeland during an Oasis gig at Knebworth in 1996. Although as ‘Dean Blunt’ he continues to give very little of himself away to the media, Blunt’s music has taken a newly personal direction, striking a balance between emotional narrative and the odd textures that will be familiar to Hype Williams fans.

Blunt does seem sincere about one thing however – that ‘The Redeemer’ and ‘Stone Island,’ are about, as he explains, ‘black London love.’ No longer is Blunt loitering in abstraction: these albums are about heartbreak, a messy break-up, revenge, rudderlessness and regret. The song ‘Papi’ has Blunt crooning ‘You bring out the best in me,’ while in ‘Six,’ he vows retribution: ‘There are gonna be gunshots.’ Blunt has unexpectedly taken on the role of the tortured frontman.

The spotlight on Blunt is telling: his live show is an even more personal experience than his two albums. Blunt paces menacingly about the stage throughout, intermittently launching into confessional mode at the microphone. His set opens with ‘The Pedigree,’ a song that sets the tone for much of the night: a lush sweep of clipped strings come from a charity shop synth, while Blunt croons a soulfully idiosyncratic melody, eyes fixed squarely at the floor. His delivery suits his posturing: aggressive, eccentric and a little off-kilter. Traditionally speaking, he’s a crap singer – but that matters very little here. The musicianship is left to Joanne Robertson, a folk-singer and a guitarist, who is on stage with Blunt for most of the night; and a saxophone player who lurks in the shadows throughout. The saxophonist is adds no small amount of bombast to the proceedings: the screech of his sax sits constantly at an uncomfortably high volume. Blunt and Robertson, meanwhile, blend together nicely, especially in ‘Imperial Gold,’ which contrasts Blunt’s stoned mewlings with the sustained sweetness of Robertson’s vocals. The show veered from the absurd to the beautiful – low ambling drones soundtracked a fifteen minute interval during which two strobes were shone directly at the audience, while later Robertson winsomely evoked the Cocteau Twins with ’50 Cent.’

The strength of this gig lies not just in the music but in Blunt’s performance. He has choreographed his gigs with care: various features such as his ‘bouncer,’ the strobe lighting and the ten-minute long rain segment, are repeated from venue to venue. The impact of Blunt’s show lies in his ability to marry his stage persona with his vocal stylings: his lyrics are straight out of a forgettable Ja-Rule chorus, employing well-worn R n’ B clichés: ‘Don’t you wanna be with me / Everybody knows you’re feeling me…’ Performed with such sincerity, however, we are confronted with a lonely and aggressive introvert who has loved and lost, living in a city that has reduced him to a kind of inarticulacy. Blunt’s lyrics are an urban phenomenon: just as Hype Williams utilised the ‘found sounds’ of the city (a synth line, for instance, sounding like it was being played on the clapped-out monitor of a chicken shop) so Blunt uses ‘found lyrics,’ the vocabulary of an existence steeped in MTV Base and macho street-corner talk. Blunt’s language is inadequate to his condition, and this provides him with such tense energy.

Blunt is just as much a provocateur as he is a music-maker, and this side to his persona is amplified in his live performance. He maintains the ability to surprise: for the London segment of his tour, he signed up JStar Valentine as support, a singer whose bizarre rendition of ‘Hallelujah’ in an X-Factor audition went viral last year. Unfortunately, JStar was not on the bill tonight, but Blunt’s provocation remained, mostly in his unsettling sincerity: ‘And nobody’s gonna catch you when you’re falling down / And nobody’s gonna want you when I run you out of town’ he sings on ‘Three’. The crowd were slow to applaud at the end of each song, unwilling, it seemed, to risk disturbing the prowling Blunt on stage. Not that he would have noticed anyway. This gig was really a mixture of performance art and music, careering between moments of pathos and moments that brought to mind a 4am Singstar session in a particularly dank bedsit. Such an unusual show leaves me wondering whether my enjoyment of it was a bit ‘Emperor’s new clothes.’ In this case, I think not. Blunt’s strangely sincere performance of an emotional narrative is the fulcrum of a show which cements his reputation as a frighteningly clever pop manipulator.

Blunt got me high (!): here’s hoping he returns to Dublin soon. This time with JStar Valentine in tow.

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