A generational pop talent: Rina Sawayama, at the O2 Academy Brixton, reviewed

The first time I saw Franz Ferdinand was at the sadly lost Astoria, just after the release of their first album. I’d liked but not loved the record, but that night I experienced the single most exciting thing in live music: artist and audience absolutely united in the conviction that this – the biggest gig of their career so far and by far – was the last time this band would be playing a place this small. Both band and audience – and even the VIP enclosure of the balcony, in front of where I stood – radiated excitement about all of us being in this together: prepare for lift-off, next stop the stars!

Rina Sawayama’s Brixton show was the same febrile, euphoric, shared experience. She strode around the stage as if she were already in an arena, gazing at a point 100ft behind the back wall of the Academy. She and her band came with the trappings of an arena gig, too: with a catwalk and steps, a pair of dancers, plus the four-act structure that’s common with arena pop shows to allow for costume changes and to group songs by mood or theme. It’s testament to Sawayama’s skill that even the third act – often the dreariest part of the show, full of ballads intended to heighten the impact of an all-bangers finale – was dramatic and involving.

Sawayama is a genre magpie. In 90 minutes, we got nu-metal-lite (‘STFU!’), softly orchestrated melancholy (‘Minor Feelings’), chugging new wave (‘Catch Me in the Air’), gossamer summer pop (‘Bad Friend’), windswept power ballads (‘To Be Alive’), four-on-the-floor house (‘Lucid’) and more – so one was rarely more than three minutes away from a change in mood. And her musical choices are so unerring that she can make gold from the base metals of styles that usually leave me cold.

A few critics were irritated by the lyrical themes of her second album, Hold the Girl, which fit into an autumn trend for albums that devote plenty of real estate to recounting therapy sessions (see also Marcus Mumford’s solo record). But, whether or not you care for therapy-speak, one had to admire her absolute confidence in standing in front of 5,000 people and talking about parenting her inner child, And, frankly, you didn’t need to know a single word of these songs to get carried away by it all. After the show, I was upbraided by a fellow music writer for saying that I thought Sawayama was a generational pop talent, but I stand by it.

If Sawayama projected herself at arena scale, that’s not just a stylistic choice; she pretty much has to. For one thing, pop this expansive and clearly commercially ambitious just doesn’t work if you have to stay in theatres – it depends on being a self-fulfilling prophecy of hugeness. The other thing is that the money is likely going to run out if she doesn’t get to arenas. Her show wasn’t a full arena production, but it was getting there. In the post-pandemic world, a lot of artists at big club- and theatre-level – this level – are cancelling tours because they can’t make any money. Sawayama, two thirds of whose touring experience has come post-pandemic, very likely needs to make the step up just to survive on her own terms.

The Great British Bake Off comes up surprisingly often in conversation with bands. I’ve heard one homesick British quartet, recording in LA, talk of gathering around the laptop to watch each episode the minute it became available. I’ve heard American musicians talk about it as a treat on tour buses. Japanese Breakfast’s show at the Forum clashed with custard week, and Michelle Zauner and her band came onstage to the Bake Off theme – an unusual but delightful addition to the list of great walk-on music.

So it wasn’t all that great a surprise when she started talking about her and her band’s love of ‘The Great British Baking Show’ – its American title – before ‘Slide Tackle’, a slick, gorgeous song that echoed a million things without being any of them: little dashes of Chic, of scratchy indiepop, of shoegaze. It was more of a surprise, though, when she introduced a guest trombonist to join the sax player already onstage, and on strode Jürgen Krauss, the softly-spoken, middle-aged German who was the cult favourite from last year’s series.

Not only was Krauss audible, but Slide Tackle’s recorded version does require two horns, so he was useful, too. The column has no hesitation in awarding him the 2022 award for most significant contribution made by a Bake Off contestant to an indie rock show. If only he could have stayed for another song, maybe an Elvis cover. ‘In The Gateau’, perhaps.