Stormzy

Motorpoint Arena, Nottingham                                         Touring until April 4

Rating:

Sam Fender

Motorpoint Arena, Nottingham                                         Touring until April 6

Rating:

A working-class hero, John Lennon sang in 1970, is something to be. It’s even truer now, when pop is a neighbourhood that has become semi-gentrified.

This month not one but two working-class heroes have reached the nation’s arenas, representing very different constituencies – one a rapper from South London, the other a rocker from North Shields.

Stormzy is on a long-delayed lap of honour, celebrating the No 1 album Heavy Is The Head (2019) and cementing his position as Britain’s biggest black pop star.

His show, devised by Beyoncé’s stage designers, is a fireworks display with some music attached. As it turns out, the pyrotechnics are barely needed because Stormzy has energy to burn.

His vocals are fusillades of pride and fury, and his physique is 6ft 5in of solid charisma. Running, jumping, chatting and laughing, he works the room like nobody I’ve seen in an arena since George Michael. 

Although he’s no fan of the present Government, Stormzy embodies traditional Tory values.

He’s self-made, hard-working, God-fearing, family-minded, public-spirited and fond of the Union Jack. Lady Thatcher would have loved him.

His material is hit-and-miss but the highlights are immense, from a fizzing Audacity (now rhymed with ‘10,000-capacity’) to a touching Blinded By Your Grace.

‘From the bottom of my heart,’ he says, ‘I will never stop being grateful.’ To prove it, he leaps into the crowd at the end and sets about thanking every one of us in person.

Sam Fender’s show is less spectacular but just as likeable. After doing well with his first album, Hypersonic Missiles, he has done even better with the second, Seventeen Going Under.

He has found his voice, almost literally: for the first time he is singing in his Geordie accent.

Fender combines conservative music – stirring anthems, steeped in Bruce Springsteen – with progressive lyrics, tackling issues that many young men struggle to talk about, up to and including suicide.

If his presence is a little too self-effacing, his voice, with its easy lilt, is made for the arenas. And, like Stormzy, he radiates gratitude.