His silhouette hits before the beat. Laser beams strike the wide brim of his hat, bouncing in shards off the sequins. A soft slide of smoke, waist-deep. The slow, smug slither of bass. No greeting. No shout. Just “Hey Daddy” curling out of the dark like breath on a mirror. He doesn’t walk onstage so much as materialise. The O2 already leans toward him, like a wine glass on a silk table, seconds before the spill.
Every move is a tease. Steps calibrated with such precision they almost slide out of rhythm, then don’t. The dancers orbit him in a perfect constellation—bodies engineered, sequenced. Velvet lighting. Glistening floor. His shoulders roll like he’s remembering something unshareable. The scream when he sings the first line? It comes from the rafters. Women with mortgages. Men mouthing lyrics behind their girlfriends’ heads.
A jump cut to “My Way.” No logic. No lead-in. A jolt of 90s R&B memory, twitchy and precise. His hips lock into the groove like the beat’s an old friend with dirt on him. Sixteen-year-old swagger reinhabited by a man who now owns the building. That smile—too smooth, maybe, like he knows how clean it all looks from the outside.
Then a blur. Two songs later? Ten? Time gets sticky. And suddenly it’s “U Got It Bad.” He’s seated alone, backlit and lowered, like someone remembering a mistake in real time. The falsetto barely scrapes the edges of the room. Not showy—almost retreating. A fissure you feel more than hear. I catch a woman three seats over pausing her video mid-chorus, tears forming fast. The teenage boy beside her mouths every word, eyes locked forward, phone untouched.
Orange light—low, dirty, prolonged. You’re straining to see anything when the next thing lands: “Climax.” No eruption. Just a held breath. Minimalism as tension. A single spotlight, static as a crime scene. His falsetto ghosts its way up the scale. The synth line pulses like a signal from a dying machine. He doesn’t dance. He barely moves. The stage is vacuumed of everyone else. The silence is reverent—churchlike, but cooler.
You start to settle into it, thinking maybe this is the soul of the show. Then everything breaks. “Yeah!” detonates from the subs like a fire alarm in a nightclub. Lil Jon erupts from nowhere like a voiceover in your brain. The crowd stops pretending they’re composed. I see a man in his 50s chuck a vape skyward. Usher goes full ignition—his choreo tight enough to draw blood, but he moves like he’s flirting with chaos. He dodges the beat. Then taunts it. The girl two rows ahead is midair. Possibly not coming down.
Somewhere in all of that, there are costume changes. Plural. Sequins shifts into lleather, then something wet and semi-translucent. There’s a jacket that reflects light like a disco ball having an existential crisis. His boots catch my eye—specifically, the laces. I can’t look away. How are they tied so cleanly? How did they not come undone? I miss most of a verse lost in this spiral. “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love” crashes through like a door kicked open.
Later, a fan sign flashes across the screen—“Usher, Confess to Me.” He sees it. Laughs. Winks. Moves on. But he saw it. That’s the sleight of hand. It feels like he’s performing for 20,000, but it’s granular. He scans, finds, delivers. Little performances dropped into specific laps. That kind of intimacy feels dangerous in a room this size.
Midway through, the tempo doesn’t shift, but the mood does. The bassline slinks instead of struts. Hooks from old albums resurface like people you regret texting. “There Goes My Baby” barely reaches the mic—he whispers it, half-seducing the tech. A sequined bra flies past my shoulder. Security doesn’t even blink.
The visuals swing from luxury perfume ad to lucid dream: neon vines, oozing gold, skylines morphing into galaxies. One sequence features rain so real I think someone’s sprinkler system failed. At some point, a platform lifts him into the rafters and spins slowly. There’s no way it’s stable. The woman behind me whispers, “I don’t even care if it’s real.”
Feels like the ending—centre-stage, arms wide, drenched in sweat. He’s singing something that sounds like closure. Then: glitch. “Without You” begins soft, like a group hug. Builds into something nearer to prayer. The crowd overtakes him on the chorus. He lets them. The Auto-Tune shimmer is still there, but now it’s part of the warmth.
He doesn’t bow. Doesn’t do the “thank you London” routine. Just pivots. Half-smile. Walks back into the haze.
You think that’s it. People start standing. Applauding. Tweeting.
Then—lights stutter. Bass growls.
He’s back. Shirtless. Obviously. Sweat shining like lacquer. Grinding through half a verse of… I genuinely don’t know. Might be unreleased. Or invented on the spot. Doesn’t matter. Everyone’s screaming like it’s their favourite track.
And I swear on my life: the man’s boots still haven’t come undone.
Words & Photos by Richard Isaac
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