At some point during the melee that is this Slowthai gig, a bra lands on the stage. The grinning Northampton rapper drapes it over his head, a pair of flapping D-cups giving him the look of a demented puppy.
The song is Ladies, the track off his debut album, Nothing Great About Britain, where Slowthai pays tribute to “the ladies” – not just as makers of babies, but as makers of men. Like any number of rappers on both sides of the Atlantic, Tyron Frampton was raised by strong women in the face of considerable odds, an upbringing he details later on a track called Northampton’s Child. In short: teenage mum, absent dad, dodgy stepfather, a series of council flats, the death of his baby brother… it has all arguably contributed to making Slowthai the breakout British artist of 2019, in cultural significance, if not crude album sales.
The bra ears, meanwhile, come accessorised with a John Lydon stare, a bottle of Buckfast, a T-shirt that says “Slowthai” in the form of the Irn-Bru logo, and, later, a bare chest with prison inmate-style tattoos – one of them Nothing Great About Britain. His wide, gappy smile speaks both of an overactive inner child and something darker.
Another set of floppy ears roams the stage: Woioii the Crack Rabbit, a mascot with a filthy bunny head and demonic, glowing red eyes. Woioii has his own Instagram and apparently represents Slowthai’s chemically inclined past. Two songs in is Drug Dealer, in which the young Frampton – a stigmatised young male from the “Bush” area of Northampton, where the council estates are hidden behind a screen of trees – answers a teacher’s question about his future plans with a truthful reply. He’ll be a drug dealer when he grows up. (“Sorry mum” is another of his tattoos.)
Alongside Slowthai’s DJ, producer and hype man, Kwes Darko, Woioii is there to swirl up a moshpit that doesn’t actually require risotto levels of prodding. A circle pit takes up all the space between the stage and the mixing desk in this sold-out 1,250-capacity venue. The gig was recently upgraded to accommodate demand – in no way was a smaller boîte elsewhere in this warehouse complex going to contain all this consensual aggro. Slowthai’s sonics tend largely towards grime and US hip-hop, but the action has the muscular gaiety of a punk gig. “Run clockwise in a circle until your feet fall off!” he commands at one point, part chaos-bringer, part drill sergeant. He could easily be caricatured as the attack dog of austerity Britain – Nothing Great About Britain uses his hyper-local reference points to make universal arguments about class, race, the withdrawn ladders of social mobility and slippery slopes snaking down – but Slowthai’s gleeful charisma makes his a more complex offering than that.
In medieval times, court jesters were licensed to tell truth to power, provided they entertained. Slowthai is fulfilling that brief in 2019. Sometimes he is direct and uncouth (“Elizabeth, you cunt,” he quips, on the title track of his debut album). There are a couple of dud songs in this set, where the energy levels drop and the tunes don’t quite make up for it.
Sometimes, however, there is a greater degree of sophistication at play. His ideas can startle. Instead of a backdrop, the Bet Ya a £5er tour (tickets: £5) features a clever trick: lots of mirrors, as you might find in a perv’s boudoir. Not, as Slowthai later jokes, to show off how great the back of him looks, but to hold up a mirror to what is actually great about Britain, its people – or Slowthai fans, at any rate. Even in an age of social media, Slowthai is particularly fan-forward, using Twitter to max out the guest list, inviting an audience member – tonight, make way for Phoebe – on stage to perform the absent guest MC Skepta’s verse on Inglorious.
At the Mercury prize ceremony last month, Slowthai may not have won the album of the year prize (Dave did), but he dominated the talking points by waving around a rubbery severed head of Boris Johnson. Tonight’s merch stall is doing a roaring trade in those obscene Boris Ts, a “fuck Boris” chant echoing even after the gig ends. While the Mercury symbolism was blunt, Slowthai’s Twitter justification – not an apology – explained his actions: “The people in power who are trying to isolate and divide us are not the ones who will feel its effects the hardest. They’re not the ones queuing at the food banks, not the ones navigating universal credit, and not the ones having to deal with systematic oppression and hate crimes at the hands of privileged politicians who say what they want without fear and consequence.”
Tonight, the pontificating is kept to a minimum: there are many young pores to open in this sweat bath and belongings to sacrifice to the pit (“You lost your glasses? Get some new ones!” Slowthai suggests). And if the set list mostly revisits songs from his five-month-old album – it feels like it has been around far longer – a couple of tracks point forwards. Slowthai has spoken vaguely of his next steps – an album that you can smell, “growth”, “not a follow-up or a sequel”, but in the meantime, momentum is gathering further afield.
Released last month, a new single, Psycho, found Slowthai combining with Florida rapper Denzel Curry in a two-hander that dripped with ferocity. It established that a man known for rapping about Cash in the Attic, being blacklisted by minicab firms and tea and biscuits now has traction Stateside. Curry’s not here tonight, but everyone goes feral for Psycho nonetheless, featuring as it does some of Slowthai’s most impressive wordplay so far: “Flow is hysterical, you sound terrible/High off the chemicals, turn you vegetable, why are you cynical?/You are minuscule, drain you of minerals, nothin’ but residue.”
Shorter and less impressive is Heaven Belongs to You, his contribution to the latest album by US outfit Brockhampton, somewhere between a boyband and a hip-hop crew. Significantly, Slowthai recently gave up his slot supporting Liam Gallagher on his forthcoming dates to join Brockhampton’s North American tour, signalling, perhaps, a desire to capitalise on his burgeoning reputation in the US rather than be misunderstood by ageing mods.
For now, though, Slowthai is still repping hard for the east Midlands, a proxy for the whole country. Doorman, the night’s final track, is about the perils of fancying a rich girl, and the role of club doormen and gatekeepers of all sorts, “the people who shut the door in your face and don’t give you the opportunity”. It’s a huge singalong in which mayhem ensues. There is no encore.
