We may look back on this as the moment Bobbie Johnson raised herself up to the next level. Playing to her home crowd at the Green Door Store, kicking off a tour of her 2016 EP You & I, she drew a reaction from her fans that would be impossible for all but the most powerful performers. A formidable presence, she performed her EP tracks with confidence and ease – but also previewed some new material, which suggests the best may be yet to come.

She chose to open the show with the more laid back songs from her repertoire and slowly ramp it up from there. The production for the first songs borrowed freely from across genres: bright and soulful piano on ‘Platforms’, nostalgic jazz guitar for ‘Problems’, and soft blues vocal samples on ‘You Say’. All of her tracks felt distinctly home-made and uniquely textured. Over the top she laid her stylish and understated flow, which, for these, fell somewhere between rap and poetry.

The same sense of social conscience that’s prevalent in the local hip-hop scene runs through her work. She’s part of a youth community that’s increasingly under attack from local government as cuts disproportionately target young people. They are growing more and more frustrated with the sense of political apathy in the UK, finding their voices in rap cyphers and open mics. Take the refrain of ‘Problems’, for example: "everybody’s got problems / but no-one’s trying to stop them", or ‘‘Great’ Britain’, written about the ill-informed hypocrisy of Brexit and its effect on young people. There’s also a feminist dialectic there, but beyond her lyrics she’s a political figure just by being on-stage: a woman in a traditionally misogynistic genre, she made a statement by arranging an all-female support line-up. Onstage she was able to toe the line between passion and anger, her authenticity clearly resonating with people more deeply than just musically.

That’s not to say it was all about politics, or that she didn’t put on an excellent show, she owns the stage like a real professional. We can probably chalk this up to her recent tour with Rag’n’Bone man, where she had to make it or break it in front of huge crowds. As she built up the energy of her set, moving to heavier songs like ‘Bang’ with its crunchy beat, siren melody and shockingly fast rapping, she reflected this in her command of the space, using the whole stage so it seemed full – not easy with just her and her DJ.

It was one of those gigs that snowballs into something special. The Green Door was packed and there was obviously a lot of love for Bobbie in the room. She fed off the crowd and they fed off her, so that by her last track, where she previewed a very heavy, grime-influenced number from her next release, the whole place was in the palm of her hand. It erupted at her say-so (and partly because of a well-placed rewind by her DJ, Nelson Navarro) into something that verged on out-of-control. She won’t be playing venues this size for long!
Ben Noble

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