Rap that feels like a sociology lecture: Loyle Carner at Alexandra Palace reviewed

A few years ago, I asked the young American soul singer Leon Bridges — a latter-day Sam Cooke, with the old-fashioned song arrangements to match — if he ever pondered the incongruity of being a black man, backed by a white band, playing music in the African-American tradition to audiences that (in the UK at least) were almost entirely white. ‘I have a song called “Brown Skin Girl”,’ he replied, ‘and I ask “Where my brown-skinned girls at?” And there’s maybe one or two in the crowd. It’s a little awkward sometimes.’

His words came to mind watching Adia Victoria. Despite her being an African-American woman signed to a major label — her brilliant album Silences came out on Atlantic earlier this year — the audience in the upstairs room of a London pub was almost entirely white. Like Bridges, she draws on older traditions. She plays a version of the blues that borrows thematically, rather than musically.