Tinie Tempah
Koko, London
27/10/2010

Chucking signed T-shirts into the crowd might be a bit on the Radio 1 Roadshow side, and covering ‘Bad Romance’ and ‘Viva La Vida’ could’ve been a reckless wallop of the pop button too far, but getting some proper crikey-I-didn’t-think-they’d-be-there special guests (Ellie Goulding! Tinchy Stryder! Etc!) is a call only open to the genuinely mighty. While having Kelly Rowland send over a video apologising for her failure to sing along with ‘Invincible’ in person is just showbiz in extremis. This, then, is the world of Tinie Tempah as his first year of fame starts sliding out of view, and it’s as insistently demented as you might hope.

He’s quite the gentleman, mind you, apologising to his mother for necking a shot onstage and proving as all-inclusive in his banter as Pharrell at his peak, but he’s got a wickedly filthy mouth when he puts his mind to it, and even above the strategic swearing he’s engaged in all kinds of jaw-dropping, well, jawing. As a performer, he’s got an authority (he doesn’t even have to move during ‘Intro’ to be immediately totemic) and fluidity that frankly ought to be mandatory in hip-hop, UK or otherwise, and ‘Disc-Overy’, as everyone here’s acutely aware, has more lyrical jewels in its confines than any album this year save ‘This Is Happening’.

Needless to say, they’re doled out with no little aplomb here and received at consistently devotional pitch – indeed, the braggadocio of ‘Frisky’ and pathos of ‘Obsession’ essentially get the same rapturous reception – until the closing proceedings topple into the daftly epic as an instantaneously mountainous ‘Miami 2 Ibiza’ clears the stage to be replaced by a repeated sampled “where’s my fucking clap, where’s my encore?” (look at him, he’s been a cheeky bastard indeed) before ‘Pass Out’‘s swoonsome smorgasbord, essentially the dub-grime-electro-broken-beats sort of thing Lily Allen always laid claim to, positively erupts. As audacious and as pivotal to what it means to be young and in love with music as the Arctic Monkeys were five years previously or Eminem was a further half-decade earlier, Tinie’s found himself fleetly standing on the shoulders of giants; we’re just lucky he’s so happy to share the view…

Iain Moffat