Stripped back, it’s legendary music
O2 Arena John Legend
Has John Legend got too big for his own music? There is no question that he is a supreme talent. The American soul man sings beautifully, with a liquid flow and smooth tone that bridges Marvin Gaye and Nat King Cole. He plays piano with dazzling, jazzy spontaneity, leading an impeccable virtuoso band through tightly woven arrangements of songs that have emotional content, philosophical meaning, melodic sweetness and rhythmic groove.
But it is music that you ideally need to really engage with, feel the subtle nuances of the playing, lose yourself in the performance. At a jazz club or intimate theatre, this show would have been mind-blowing. Here, though, there was a sense that Legend and his team may have over-compensated for the huge, cavernous, concrete arena spaces where it can be hard to put across music’s more subtle pleasures. The production was over-designed, over-elaborate and over-scripted.
The stage design was ambitious yet oddly ill-conceived. It involved a lot of moving LED screens that constantly altered the architecture of the floor space. While technically impressive, it had the presumably unintended effect of cutting off Legend from his musicians and, in the opening number, from the audience. He was on stage for a full song before I even caught a glimpse of him in the flesh. There were members of his band (tightly packed along the back of the stage) who were obscured from my sightline for the entire show. I could hear a brilliant percussionist throughout but never caught a glimpse of them.
This separation from the band seemed odd in music that elevates musicianship. Legend performed much of the show isolated at the front of a vast stage, with individual musicians taking it in turn to step forward and share the limelight.
The 38-year-old singer-songwriter, raised plain John Stephens, started out as a sideman for Kanye West, and, I suspect, is not a natural showman. He spent much of the time sliding and crooning around a microphone, but his moves have a kind of gestural largeness to them. He dances in huge, exaggerated steps, like a pantomime villain creeping across the stage. If he weren’t so handsome, dapper and slickly charismatic, it would be comical rather than cool.
His patter shifted through the gears of two slightly contradictory personas, smoothly romantic lover and platitudinous preacher. He revealed that his wife, model Chrissy Teigen, was in the room. I wonder how she felt about seeing home movies of her and their one-year-old daughter, Luna, projected on those vast screens? It is the kind of personal gesture that reaches towards intimacy but inevitably, in such a setting, is tainted by sentimental manipulation.
In last year’s movie sensation
La La Land, Legend played a band leader whose music has shifted so far from its jazz core it alienates piano player Ryan Gosling from his actual musicianship. In real life, Legend seems to be grasping the horns of a similar dilemma.
If you could cut through all of the production hoopla and showbiz frippery to focus on the music, what was pouring out on stage was fantastic. But it was telling that the biggest audience responses came when Legend just sat down and played and sang without his band, creating genuine intimacy through his deep connection to the music. It would be some challenge trying to carry off a whole night in an arena like that, but if he really wants to live up to his stage name, it might be time to give it a shot.