Watching Frank Ocean live presents me with a problem; one that all music lovers will be familiar with. How will they make the record, that record that you’ve loved, that’s soundtracked your private moments of pain, your public moments of joy, your travels, your hangovers, your rain-sodden walks to work…how will they make it sound now? What will this performance add to the record? What will it take away? For records like ‘Channel Orange’ and ‘Nostalgia, Ultra’ are not just generic background hum, they are alive with feeling, emotion and reality; they become a part of your life.
It’s almost needless to say, but sometimes stating the obvious is a necessity: Frank Ocean is epically good live.
What he brings to the records is a sense that the private world that’s been in your headphones is shared with the assembled gig-goers; never in all my years of live music have I heard an entire crowd (a very diverse crowd, I might add) sing along so emphatically and so completely with every single word of every single song. When you have a moment with records and re-play them as many times as Oceans deserve, you take in the lyrics almost by osmosis – to the point that on Wednesday night, it was practically singalonga-Ocean.
The way he constructs his lyrics, his songs, his albums, and his live shows revolves around an honesty and an intimacy with the listener – while Frank performed pretty-much straight-up versions of his tracks, jiggled around (aside from a minor-chorded rendition of ‘Sweet Life’; a brilliantly-used device that serves to perfectly reflect what the song is actually about), what this performance passed on was to confer the true meanings of the songs. This honesty lends a new perspective on songs that seem on the face of it to be party-songs. Songs like ‘Lost’, ‘Monks’ and ‘Pyramids’ are trompe l’oreilles; they sound like bangers but are in fact incredibly sad, and that’s what you are reminded of when you see him live – truth.
What Frank’s show tells the audience is that his connection is with them is real – in the same way that he approaches press (with trepidation); Frank’s songs are all that he wants to communicate. There’s very little inter-song chat, or even the interludes that characterise the records, though he does introduce ‘Pyramids’ with a self-effacing (even more so given the crowd’s reaction) “as long as you guys are having a good time”. It’s akin to someone shouting into a rave “pills pills pills” – the response is ecstatic. Ocean shows that he knows how to work a room and structure a show in the same way the he structures an album, but also that he does it his own way – for him it’s not about the showmanship, the outfits or a dazzling lightshow – it is ALL ABOUT THE SONGS.
It’s about as subtle as a pop concert will get, but it’s the showing of someone very confident – but crucially not overconfident – in their artistic ability, and their ability to thrill an audience. Whether he wants to or not, Ocean’s way with music and lyrics, his sincerity of performance resulting in anthemic songs – Frank Ocean is the next biggest star to hit our stages. Perhaps this is over-egging the pudding that this somewhat OTT review has become, but Frank Ocean’s show seemed to underling, in the most moden way possible, the famous Keats line from Ode to a Grecian Urn: “beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
I cannot implore enough that if you’re at a festival where he’s playing, to go and see him – stand at the front, soak it up, take it in and enter the world – this is just the beginning of a surely glittering, fantastical, intriguing and mesmerising career of Mr Frank Ocean.
- Seb Law
