Music review: George Ezra, Barrowland, Glasgow

THE only offensive thing about George Ezra is his utter inoffensiveness. '¨The Hertfordshire guitar-pop singer-songwriter with the benevolent baritone voice is just rootsy enough to feel authentic, comfortably pop enough to rule the airwaves, and entirely unthreatening enough to appeal to every generation from kids to grandparents.
George EzraGeorge Ezra
George Ezra

George Ezra, Barrowland, Glasgow ***

With his second album Staying at Tamara’s set to end 2018 as the year’s biggest-seller by a UK artist by a country mile, he’s the blonde boy wonder most likely to do an Ed Sheeran sometime soon.

For this Glasgow show, Ezra and his bandmates’ selfless dedication to unobtrusiveness even extended to dressing as plainly as possible, all in black.

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Don’t Matter Now opened on a note of chastely grooving blues-pop, decorated with politely soulful horn fanfares. Get Away paraphrased the globo-funk fretless bass slither of 1980s Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel. Echoing the gap-year backpacker romanticism of his half-a-billion-times streamed signature ballad Budapest ­– which would give Ezra’s main set its denouement by camera light glow an hour or so later – Barcelona was basically a down-tempo song ruminating on how it’s lovely to go on holiday sometimes.

Ezra’s generationally-mixed but mostly young fanbase screamed at his every cheerful banality, and hopped around joyfully to the speedy 
Paradise, before swiftly returning to filming or live-streaming the concert or whatever else it was they were doing through their smartphone viewfinders.

Returning to one of his favourite lyrical themes – going on holiday – Ezra gave it both barrels in the affable melodicism stakes with Shotgun, a song which said it all really about the addictive feeling his music instills in fans – that of endless summer. MALCOLM JACK