A battle with fame – but the sweary joker’s hits keep on coming
When Lewis Capaldi broke through with Someone You Loved in 2019, Elton John invited him to his villa near Nice and posted a photo on Facebook. ‘Spending the day,’ he wrote, ‘with the next British superstar.’
Elton does like to bestow his seal of approval but in this case he was spot-on. Four years later, Capaldi’s debut album is still selling: last week it was No 11, just below Elton’s Diamonds.
This could easily make for a difficult second album. Capaldi has found fame hard to handle, but the hits keep on coming. Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent starts with three No 1 singles.
Capaldi has two public personas: the sweary joker now diagnosed with Tourette’s and the more conventional balladeer. On stage these twins share the limelight but in the studio the balladeer takes over. Nine of these 12 songs are slow and even the faster ones feel like ballads on speed.
The first few are love songs, but by the end of the album Capaldi is addressing himself. ‘So here’s to my beautiful life,’ he sings, ‘that seems to leave me so unsatisfied. No sense of self but self-obsessed.’ On The Pretender: ‘I’ll be anybody but me,’ he confesses.
‘To tell you the truth, I’m the fraud in the room and I know that.’
It’s a bold move from someone who’s loved because people see him as authentic.
His singing is piercing, at times painfully so. But the songs, mostly supplied by the usual suspects, are merely competent.
Stewart Copeland, the revered drummer from The Police, has turned his old hits into a show called Police Deranged For Orchestra. Copeland used to clash with Sting, and you can see why: he has the stage presence of a frontman. Now 70, he radiates chutzpah, which was probably needed when he asked 20 classical musicians to play white reggae. The songs gleam with invention and The Police’s lean sound lends itself well to strings and horns.
The Anchoress lit up lockdown with her beautiful album The
Art Of Losing, which was ironic because she herself was stuck at home shielding. Now she is on tour, with a pair of sturdy air purifiers acting as her bodyguards. Catherine Anne Davies makes electro-pop that is anything but mechanical. Her songwriting sparkles, her covers shed new light on classic tracks by New Order and All About Eve, and her voice goes straight to the heart.