It's hard to imagine anyone looking less like a pop star than Rory Graham, aka Rag’n’Bone Man. He was so painfully shy that after mumbling how humbled he was to sell-out the Scala, he excused himself from between-song chit-chat by claiming “you don’t want to hear me talk”.
With a never-removed donkey jacket suggesting he wasn’t going to be making himself comfortable (he didn’t and was gone within the hour); tattoos on the backs of his hands; a scraggly beard and the certainty that he’s eating well, Rag’n’Bone Man resembled, well, a rag’n’bone man. Or James Corden before the makeover. But when he started to sing, the frog became a prince.
Whether growling through Wolves or reaching near-falsetto on Life in Her Yet, his voice was an instrument of compelling gospel-blues beauty. With unwavering believability, he delivered anger (Guilt pondered “a million ways to hurt you running round and round in my head”), solitude, unwise deals with the devil and a cover of Mary Mary’s modern gospel classic, Shackles (Praise You).
His voice may have been traditional and it was strong enough to hush a whooping room when it went a cappella, but his spartan yet thumping electro backing was as contemporary as James Blake. And he’s already neatly side-stepping pigeon-holing, so the outstanding Hell Yeah, with its mighty, radio-friendly chorus, was as much a statement of intent as the slow-burning floor-quaking epic Lay My Body Down.
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Like any shy man with a big voice tentatively following the path almost cleared by Ray LaMontagne, Graham is far from the finished article as a performer.
As an artist, though, he’s the real deal: the unlikely missing link between blues giant Robert Johnson and Brits giant Sam Smith.
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