Music
Review
Raye at Reading Festival, 24/08/2024
The singer-songwriter always delivers on the vocals, but it’s her thoughtfully curated setlist that shines in her main stage performance
There are many foreign acts who take the stage at Rockstar Energy presents Reading and Leeds Festival, and speak about how they’ve always dreamed of finding themselves at one of the UK’s biggest celebrations of live music. Then there is Raye, who doesn’t idealise her crowd, but knows them, because she grew up amongst them. Ten years ago, she was a 16-year-old who, having just received her GCSE results, put her sleeping bag under her arm and marched off to Little John’s Farm with her friends – although according to her, she spent more time at the “dance tent” than the main stage.
“And I said, I’m going to play here one day,” she tells the crowd. Raye isn’t just pleased to be playing Reading – she is positively gleeful. Enthusiasm radiates out of every pore. With her brass section, white piano and stellar choir of backing vocalists, she has arrived at Reading with one mission: to show this crowd a good time.
Opening with a run of feel-good tracks – ‘Flip a Switch’, ‘Decline’ and ‘Worth it’ and treating the crowd to a slightly pared down version of ambitious new single ‘Genesis’, she gets real with us. She’s prepared a party for us, she says, and there are – after a quick count in her head – six songs coming that will more than deliver. But first, she wants our permission to play “one sad song. Just one.”
“I promised myself when I became an independent artist that I would make honest music about the things I have been through. Music is medicine, and music can make you heal and feel better, heard and listened to.” The track she is setting up is ‘Ice Cream Man’, a brutally moving number from My 21st Century Blues that explores her experience with sexual assault. “I pray you don’t relate to, but if you do I hope it feels like a hug,” she says, through tears, before launching into the song.
For an artist with less presence and less authenticity, the song might feel out of place on this setlist. Instead, ‘Ice Cream Man’ is a glorious high point, especially poignant in a year where Reading & Leeds has introduced more messaging than ever about preventing violence against women and girls. Relatable or not to the listener, Raye’s emotional rendition of the song is far from depressing – it is the warmest of embraces.
From there, having allowed us into her deeply personal moment, the singer-songwriter stresses that the rest of the set is about us. She’s been hard at work in rehearsals thinking what we might like to dance to, and what she brings is an expertly curated setlist. There’s an Afrobeats version of her David Guetta collaboration, ‘Bed’, a jazzy reimagining of ‘You Don’t Know Me’, and all of the most upbeat, Reading-friendly tracks that her voice has touched. She holds the hand of the assembled crowd throughout the set, eager to keep us all involved, excited to introduce whatever she has for us next. “Okay, this is a song called ‘Black Mascara’,” she tells us. When that’s done – “Now we’re going to do a short rock version of a song called ‘Prada’.” Whether you’re a long-time fan or a casual listener wandering across the back of the field, no-one is left behind.
Of course, Raye closes out with ‘Escapism’, the viral track that launched her into the mainstream. Despite the infectious beat, it’s a deeply sad song about loneliness, heartbreak and repeated mistakes. Delivered from the Reading mainstage to a crowd of thousands in Raye’s powerful, flexible and deeply emotive voice, it becomes something incredibly uplifting. This is an artist who has not only made a space for herself in an industry that pushed her aside for years, but forever changed it. The 18:00 Saturday slot is an excellent one, but here’s hoping that a couple of years see her back on that line-up a little further up. She’s a born a headliner.
