Successful second acts in talent-show stardom are so rare that James Arthur is not only lucky, but also a gangly beam of encouragement to other pop acts who have done foolish things and run out of career road. Approaching the end of his first arena tour, buoyant on the enthusiasm of his Jarmy – the superfans who’ve filled almost every seat in the house – he could be any 29-year-old singer wrapping up a satisfying 2017. When he proudly notes that everything we hear tonight is “played by the individuals on this stage”, it even seems that winning the X Factor in 2012 no longer hampers his efforts to be heard as a dues-paying musician. Carry on like this, and he’ll soon be accepted into the George Ezra/Paolo Nutini brotherhood of adult-pop respectability, judged by the merits, or otherwise, of his music, rather than by his origins.
That said, as the most recent X Factor winner most people can actually name, he would typically have some way to go before shedding the association entirely. Luckily for him, that narrative has been supplanted by an extraordinary comeback story. When Arthur was ostracised by the public in 2013 for using homophobic and Islamophobic language on a diss track – and was dropped by his label in early 2014 – there should have been no way back. He apologised and cited mitigating factors, but they cut no ice. His plea that he’d been ignored by Rita Ora after a “steamy night on her tour bus” elicited little sympathy. Similarly, few were moved when he said he had been driven to drugs to cope with the pressure of selling 1.4m copies of his debut single, Impossible – the biggest-selling single by an X Factor winner. Intemperate use of Twitter exacerbated things.
Yet he turned it around, which testifies partly to the doggedness of the Jarmy. The response when Arthur asks “Who voted for me on the X Factor?” suggests that every Jarmista in the house has been with him since day one. Clearly, they were there in 2016, when Sony Germany decided to take a chance on him, presumably seeing in him an artist who could rival both romantic troubadour Ed Sheeran and dude-next-door rocker James Morrison. The leap of faith was rewarded by a chart-topping single, Say You Won’t Let Go, and an album, Back from the Edge.
A series of interviews in which he discussed his anxiety disorder – he is now an ambassador for the mental-health charity Sane – also helped to rewrite his story, and now, bearded and dark-suited, here he is headlining Wembley Arena. “It’s been blood, sweat and tears and sacrifice to get to this point,” Arthur tells the Jarmy, who whoop empathetically. When an errant star can’t rely on popularity among fellow artists to tide them over, having a motivated fanbase is the next best thing.
However, having returned so emphatically, Arthur has a new challenge: he’s become an arena artist, but possesses little arena craft. Where Sheeran is a master at holding a large crowd, Arthur is more a Morrison: assured when immersed in the music, but self-conscious and retiring when not. The physical accoutrements of a big gig have been built in, including the large backing band who pump drama into the set’s many ballads and the starkly striking set made of cathode-ray TVs, but it’s as if they’ve been built around someone who would rather be playing a much smaller place. There’s a telling moment during the ponderous Certain Things. Asking us to wave if we believe in universal love, Arthur cajoles: “Don’t be shy, you don’t look like a dick.” Is he betraying fear that he himself, centre of attention on that massive stage, looks like one?
Despite the set’s ballad load, best of which is a cover of Careless Whisper that shows off his pitch-perfect voice, Arthur’s sensitive-but-macho heart seems to lie in rock and rap. A gallop through his debut-album track Recovery, with its rumbling complement of drums and squalling guitars, seems to gratify him more deeply than having to make suitably anguished faces for the plod through Impossible. Likewise, he engages more cheerily with Sermon, a ballad that flowers into a hip-hop track, allowing him to unfurl his rhyming skills (he does have them). Giving it the full blues-rock rasp on You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You, he may well be the happiest he has been all night, apart from a duet late in the set with support act Ella Henderson. Endowed with the love for the spotlight that he lacks, she gustily leads and he follows, an arrangement that brings out the best in both. If she offered him a lesson or two in how to feel comfortable in front of 20,000 people, she would be doing him a good turn.
•At Motorpoint Arena, Nottingham, on 27 November. Box office: 0843-373 3000. Then touring until 30 November.
