Leicester would not normally be classed as home turf for a rapper from Streatham, south London. But although Dave, the 20-year-old whose debut album, Psychodrama, went to No 1 on release in March, comes from more than 100 miles away, he has been representing Leicester in song for some time.
Just the one reference you could ascribe to a convenient rhyme. Two or three and Leicester starts becoming an Easter egg in this rapper’s work, currently encompassing that No 1 album, two successful EPs and a brace of excellent collaborations. Or as Dave notes: “Leicester! I talk about it every single song!” Each time Dave drops an L-bomb tonight, the place, a sold out 1,400-capacity student venue, erupts harder than it was already erupting. This is an audience happy to kill time before Dave’s set by batting about inflated condoms: in a party mood.
One autobiographical tune, Streatham, establishes some grim basics about Dave’s formative environment. “I grew up in Streatham,” he kicks off. “Teachers was givin’ man tests, same time the mandem were giving out testers.” The protected third son of a single mother – his two brothers were both at one point in prison (one has since been released), David Omoregie gave sixth-form college a go while trying simultaneously to make it as Santan Dave, the name he still uses to introduce himself.
Omoregie studied law, ethics, philosophy and sound design in London, before his career took off in 2016 when he was still a sweet-featured teen. But Streatham finds Dave “in Leicester, skipping my lectures”. The tune never spells out why; it’s probably to do with the “peng tings” (hot girls) “giving him stress” in the previous line.
Confirmation, of sorts, comes from a guest verse Dave did for Headie One’s 18Hunna, released in January. “I got twins in Leicester, both tryna say that they’re into me, but they ain’t getting no ring from me,” Dave swaggers. Everyone roars. Blink and you’d miss the Leicester shout-out on Funky Friday, Dave’s No 1 single from October last year with fellow rapper Fredo. “Heard you got a girl going DMU,” Dave offers, referring to Leicester’s De Montfort University, “if I DM’d you would she DM me?” It’s the final track of the night – no encore – and Dave gets animated, his controlled movements growing more jagged.
In the hour he spends onstage, Dave doesn’t reveal why he spends so much lyrical time here. But Leicester appreciates the attention. The fans know the words and break into a bellow of recognition within two notes of every fresh track the DJ unleashes, most of them box-fresh from the album, a few older. Every night of this tour, Dave plucks one fan from the audience to perform Thiago Silva, his breakout tune with AJ Tracey from 2016. Tonight there’s someone in a Paris Saint-Germain shirt (Silva is a PSG player) called Harry who acquits himself brilliantly.
Black is the gig’s hard-hitting, long-form centrepiece, however, drawing on Kendrick Lamar’s The Blacker the Berry, but exploring how West African countries tend to be named by what white people extracted from them: ivory, gold, and, in the case of Benin, the “slave coast”: people. Dave’s skewering of racist double standards (“A kid dies, the blacker the killer, the sweeter the news,” runs one line) prompted some howls of incomprehension when aired on Radio 1, forcing DJs such as Annie Mac patiently to explain the legacy of hundreds of years of racism.
Like Stormzy before him, Dave’s gift is to take an awkward kid’s view of his London postcode and make its struggles universal, through storytelling, flaming wordplay and pugnacious production. That he has done so outside the major-label system says something about the quality of his output and the interesting times we are living in. Stormzy is, of course, a fan and appears in the recent video for Black, alongside footballer Raheem Sterling and fashion designer Ozwald Boateng.
Psychodrama packs in the easy, summery Afrobeats and sung hooks that work well in the new global-tropical pop landscape. Another older tune, the pacey, manic 100M’s, states Dave’s ambitions baldly, a key theme of the artists who have transcended their ends. “Mandem dream of a Mobo, don’t you want Oscars and Grammys?”
But the pursuit of money and excellence, as well put as it is in Dave’s work, is not as rewarding as his commitment to talking about suffering. Psychodrama uses a series of therapy sessions as a framing device, focusing as much on despair and mental illness as it does on cars, football and oral sex, which also figure, reminding you that this emotionally eloquent rapper was a teenager not long ago.
The take-home tonight is that Dave is not crazy, his friends are not either and their mental ill health is a perfectly logical consequence of a world that does not function logically or fairly.
Psycho, which opens both album and gig, sets the mood: “How do you stop all the pain?” Dave roars at his virtual shrink. He has a lot of it to contend with: growing up without a father; watching his mother, a nurse, struggle; losing friends to violence and betrayal; losing siblings to the penal system. “If you’re thinking about doing it,” Dave concludes, “suicide doesn’t stop the pain – you’re only moving it.”
Although Dave’s tunes are still full of all the props familiar from grime and UK hip-hop – weapons, deals, feds, threats – Dave’s verses tend towards the struggle to avoid senseless confrontation. Hangman, another highlight, covers a huge amount of grim territory. Jealousy at his success has Dave looking over his shoulder. A hasty tweet when model Harry Uzoka was killed is cause for regret: Dave tweeted in support of increased stop-and-search, which did not endear him to his core audience. (“The streets don’t love you,” alleged one respondent.) The tune itself resolves hilariously, with a little light Latin chip-tune keyboard and Dave dancing around like he does in the video in head-to-toe Nike; his themed tour vest has “insane” written on the back.
In the 90s, when grime first began, tours such as this just didn’t happen: urban music was effectively barred from functioning by the police. Now, Dave is not just a London phenomenon, but a No 1 artist resonating in a place you might mischievously call middle England: we are roughly 20 miles from the geographical centre of the nation (a field on a farm in Fenny Drayton, Leicestershire, apparently) and Dave is landing pained, angry, funny tunes about family ties, the struggle to leave street aggro behind him and critiques of colonialism on a crowd from all backgrounds. This is, unquestionably, progress.
