More about: Kendrick Lamar

Storms, gun-toting psychopaths, a President who seems to think the Book Of Revelations is a to-do list – there haven’t been many reasons of late to wish you were American, but the main one was that Kendrick Lamar’s Damn Tour was worming its way steadily across the States, leaving m.A.A.d cities reeling in its wake.

Well you can stop proposing to Milwaukee pensioners in the hope of bagging a green card, because the Damn thing is finally coming to the UK in 2018, with six dates announced across Dublin, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and London in February. And the support act is only sodding James frigging Blake. It’s set to be amongst the best tours of 2018, but here’s what we’d like to see when that butterfly-pimping night finally comes around…

A Kendrick/James collab

Picture it now: midway through ‘Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe’, Blake is lowered from the rafters sat at a floating piano for a mash-up of their greatest moments, with Blake adding that essential trapped-outside-the-airlock feel that Kendrick’s music has thus far been short on. I mean, why waste a support act like that?

The fairy-lit Cage Stage

Not for Kendrick the stripped-back acoustic bit on a second stage out in the crowd. Nope, the second stage on the Damn Tour rises out of the crowd as a dazzling dot matrix cube that he can crouch in and rap atop, like some kind of futuristic Rubick’s Rapper. A bit Watch The Throne Tour, granted, but it did set the benchmark…

The flying screen

If Kanye West and his stage designer Es Devlin raised the bar of hip-hop live production by, well, lowering the bar of overhead lights to headbutt height at Glastonbury, then Lamar has gone one better on the Damn Tour. His stage set is deceptively simple, the full band of the Kunta Groove Sessions Tour replaced by an empty stage strafed with criss-crossed sideways lights that make the stage look like the sort of thing Tom Cruise might be lowered through on a wire. But that stage-wide screen at the back has Motley Crue ambitions, it turns out. Midway through the show, it rises, tilts and lowers over Lamar to give the stage a full video ceiling, a Lamar sandwich if you will.

The rap-alongs

If you’ve ever seen a crowd go arm-flailing bonkers when given the chance to correctly guess the price of a toaster on national television, you’ll know that American audiences aren’t exactly known as the most restrained, chin-stroking types. But the crowds at Kendrick’s US shows have been on another level – exhibiting the kind of wild-ass enthusiasm you might expect to greet a headline along the lines of ‘Trump Suicide “Puts Kybosh On Brexit” Says PM Corbyn’. Lamar has been taking full advantage of such hysteria, stopping tracks like ‘HUMBLE.’ midway through to let the crowd rap heartily along. The ball’s in your court, Birmingham Genting Arena.

Bono

Plenty of ‘DAMN.’ made the regular setlist for the US stretch of the tour, with ten of its fourteen tracks played at least in part. The show’s centrepiece is ‘XXX.’, the track featuring Bono, not someone shy of showing up to steal any thunder going. So here’s hoping at least Dublin gets a glimpse of the shaded short-ass, even if the rest of us have to make do with Kung-Fu Kenny.

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More about: Kendrick Lamar