“The first time I came to London, I was Kanye West’s sidekick. I played piano and sang behind him,” says John Legend, pausing to allow the audience to wrestle with the idea of this supremely assured artist being anyone’s hired hand. Nine Grammys and an Oscar (for the song Glory, from Selma) later, he’s grown up and away from West. Legend, who wears his made-up name lightly, has commandeered a sector where personality is secondary to the song, and the song looks back to sunny retro uplands in which romance is exalted, and politics don’t figure.
His current album, Love in the Future, was executive-produced by West, but his electronic flourishes have been stripped out of Legend’s live show. Here, Legend’s light tenor and rippling piano playing shape the songs, which silkily blend soul, jazz and Latin, and his band fill in the rest. It’s a remarkably low-key presentation for an arena show: the set design begins and ends with one back screen and projections of flowers and streets, and Legend doesn’t move much. When he’s not behind the piano, he’s standing with one hand casually tucked in a pocket, the sort of lounge lizard that pop just doesn’t make any more. Yet it seems to be enough.
It takes charisma and stone-cold talent to cruise so elegantly through Tonight (Best You Ever Had) and Ordinary People – which rouses the first real squeal of the night – and even more of the same to cover Curtis Mayfield’s Move on Up and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. He has both; he also has the people-reading skills to know when to drop the restraint and growl. “This is about the old John in 2004. I was young and selfish,” he says of I Can Change. But this brief resurrection of Legend the heartbreaker just reinforces the charm of today’s older, wiser version.
- At Manchester Arena, 27 June. Box office: 0844-847 8000. Then touring.
