Lupe Fiasco @ Enmore Theatre,Sydney (21/02/10)

Fri 26th Feb, 2010 in Gig Reviews

Lupe Fiasco is a class act. Bursting onto the stage with his three-piece band (four if you consider his immense, lumbering body guard who patrolled the stage) clad in heavy shades and a brass-buttoned jacket he looks, and sounds, fantastic. Opening with Shining Down, which benefits greatly from the addition of some epic live guitar loops, that Lupe was disappointed with the track’s reception mid-last year did little to mar his robust performance.

It’s rare that you’ll ever catch Lupe struggling with his timing, but he awkwardly struggled with his jacket as he continued with Never Lies, momentarily caught between snaking his right arm free whilst trying to emphatically gesture with it. However, despite the brief wardrobe malfunction everything from his vocals to his dance moves to the beaming stage lights just fits. Following Enemy of the State’s National Anthem, he revealed one of the tracks from his upcoming third album, Lasers, which, if the lyrics were anything to go by. we can reasonably assume will be called Save My Radio. With its strong melody and shout-along chorus, this song has the potential to be huge.

Which of course provides the perfect segue to mention the bizarre company he keeps, including the aforementioned body guard who, with his giant blue track pants and baseball cap, looked like the protagonist in the upcoming Disney production of Honey, I Blew Up That Excessively Chubby Kid In Our Son’s Primary School And Now He Could Probably Maim A Giant Squid With One Punch. Not to mention the groupies creeping into view from the right flank of the stage which said body guard may or may not have been employed to keep at bay.

Hip Hop Saved My Life and Spaze Out were made even more enormous with the help of the live band, Lupe’s mesmerising stage presence making up for the overblown, blaring guitar solos which would sometimes leave the crowd feeling a little lost. N.E.R.D.’s Everybody Nose (Remix) followed, opening with a brief sample of Prodigy’s Girls, before launching into the sex-fueled body of the track that had all the sweaty girls in the audience going nuts. As did Lupe’s double-time Go Go Gadget Flow vocals and his sinewy posturing for cruisey classic, Kick Push, the oft-bespectacled Chicago MC proving himself the epitome of that effortless cool that us white folk are sadly lacking.

As the stage lights deepened to a navy blue haze, the dramatic Streets On Fire from sophomore album, The Cool, set a darker tone to ease the crowd into his performance of new track, Beautiful Lasers. Taking a seat, Lupe takes the opportunity to reveal the poignant background of the song, not an easy task when the crowd have just been riled-up by a club anthem about coke. But it’s his sincerity that is so winsome as he reveals, “I wrote this about two years ago when I was really fucked up. It was a point in my life when I didn’t want to be here anymore. I don’t mean on this stage, I mean like, on this planet. So I channelled all of that and came up with this song and it’s called Beautiful Lasers.”

Proving himself as adept at singing as he is at rapping Lupe repeatedly declares, “This world’s such a fucked up place / My mind’s such a fucked up shape.” The song flowed superbly on to the similarly lamenting Fighters, to the more hopeful I’m Beaming before finishing off the pre-encore part of the night with the single extraordinaire, Superstar.

After Paris, Tokyo, Lupe lets slip that he spent his birthday on the plane en route to Australia, “Do you know how hard it is to get everyone on a plane to sing you Happy Birthday? Especially in first class.” And so the crowd obliged. After reading out a (super-longwinded) fan-written birthday card, “You guys from MTV or whatever that are here, no, I did not write it myself…” he finished things off with Daydreamin. Closing the show with back-and-forth drum and guitar solos, Lupe ended his emotional roller-coaster Enmore show and left the punters salivating for his new record.

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