Music review: Rag 'n' Bone Man, O2 Academy Edinburgh

Rag ‘n’ Bone Man, O2 Academy, Edinburgh ***

“I had this dream that God is real,” Rory "Rag ‘n’ Bone Man” Graham told his audience. “I'm not saying he isn't real… but ‘real’ in a physical sense.” This admission was a tee-up for the Sussex-raised singer’s Crossfire, which is a plea to a higher power for a positive outcome in a failing relationship, and for humanity in general, and also also proved to be one of the catchiest, most sonically upbeat slices of pure pop in his set.

It also illustrated the split at the heart of his music, between the secularism of contemporary pop music and the devotional roots of the sound he’s made his own. With his gnarled, lived-in tone, which comes somewhere close to a raw Southern twang on the understated recent hit Anywhere Away From Here, he sang pure gospel, while the female voices of the backing singers accompanying him on the tender Alone lent a choral edge.

On his best-known hits, he grounds this sense of religious escape with a concern for human relationships: in Grace (We All Try) (“in the arms of the saint I'm a stranger / we're all trying to find our way”) and in Human, the 2016 mega-hit which made his name (“I'm no prophet or Messiah / should go looking somewhere higher”).

Two mellow, melancholy, half-paced songs in particular really showed off his astonishing voice: Changing of the Guard, about the birth of his son, a responsibility which he confesses he felt overwhelmed by, and Talking to Myself, which he explained was written about “a massive breakup.”

At the end, the tone lightened with Crossfire, with the musically upbeat Be the Man, which borrows the words if not the tune of its coda from Don Henley’s The Way It Is, and with his Calvin Harris collaboration Giant. These songs certainly grab the attention, regardless of whether the listener is thoroughly bought into them or not.

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