Verdict: Five stars
If you immerse yourself in good music from a young age, will the inevitable result be that one day, your music will sound good too?
If we go by Hozier’s performance at the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow tonight, that very well may be the case.
The Dublin native Hozier, aka Andrew John Hozier-Byrne, looked visibly shocked at the double standing ovation he received after a stellar performance on the Glasgow leg of his sold-out UK tour for Wasteland, Baby! His humbled awe and sheer joy to have such a Scottish reaction was the finishing touch on a faultless performance.
“Glasgow, I can’t tell you how good it is to be here. To be in Scotland, actually” he told a willing crowd. Asking us to compare our voices with that of crowds in Sheffield and Manchester and the likes, Hozier told us that we sounded “f*****g beautiful”.
With a full band of 8 multi-instrumentalists, Hozier’s well-loved and well-cited influences came to the fore.
His set dripped with the soul music his musical education began with - a diet of Jackie Wilson (immortalised in 'Jackie and Wilson') and Nina Simone; and nowhere else was this more obvious than in “Nina Cried Power”, “Codeine Scene” and “Work Song”.
Interestingly, Hozier’s set tonight was very rock-heavy for a previously regarded acoustic artist, but never made the fault of straying too far into guitar-shredding solo’s that – for me, anyway – become quite dull.
Paired with a truly impressive light sequence and some dedicated fans, Hozier’s set tonight resulted in a truly beautiful few hours of music. His gratitude for his band and stage crew – thanking every one of them – served to warm the glowing backdrop his songs had already sprung from.
An impressive vocal range, Hozier is all hair and limbs as he darts about his stage in complete ownership of the political love songs that rocked the world only a few years back – Take Me To Church being the pinnacle of the performance. I last saw this song performed in Dublin, at a Stand For Truth demonstration where people stood with victims of abuse.
Today is an equally political day to watch this song played live again. As Boris Johnson’s proroguing parliament is found to be unlawful, Hozier told a Glasgow crowd that ‘when they build that bridge from Ireland to Scotland, I’ll be there”.
What is there to fault, with a promise like that?
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