Divorce are the best young British band I’ve seen in an age

Can we talk business for a moment? When reviewers like me go to big arenas, we get the best seats in the house, with fantastic sightlines and excellent sound (a PR who used to work for U2 told me she would routinely reassign press into even better seats than the already splendid ones they had originally been given; you do anything you can to get an extra 1 per cent more enthusiasm into the review). When we go to standing venues, though, we are as prone to the vagaries of geography as anyone else.

And because we go to a lot of shows, we tend to arrive only five minutes before the turn we want to see goes on stage, which means we rarely find great positions. When Divorce played at Koko last week, I ended up at the very top of the old Victorian theatre, looking almost directly down on the stage, the sound muffled by the roof low above me. From the most distant spot in the gods, Divorce were absolutely breathtaking. So from down on the floor, they must have been something else.

They’re a four-piece, but let’s be brutal: only two of them matter. Drummer and second guitarist were tucked away on little platforms at the back of the stage, while singing bassist Tiger Cohen-Towell and singing guitarist Felix Mackenzie-Barrow occupied the front. The other two were exemplary players, but the front pair write the songs and sing the songs. It’s their band.

There was nothing wildly unconventional about them: often they took very familiar forms, but bent them out of shape just enough for them to sound fresh. The opening ‘Fever Pitch’ was old-fashioned slow blues fed through shoegaze. As with the brilliant Big Thief, there was a sense of their music being frayed; of it pulling itself apart at the seams. It rattled and creaked appealingly, like an old wooden chest.

There is a tension in their music, between their desire to be fuzzy and out of focus, and brutally upfront, which I think is what makes it exciting. Though no single element of what they do was unfamiliar, nothing was ever exactly as expected. They already have future arena anthems, too: gussy up ‘Karen’ or ‘Scratch Your Metal’ a bit, and the lighters will be in the air.

But – and it is a big but – there is one huge imbalance in this group. Cohen-Towell possesses at least 90 per cent of the charisma. They have an extraordinary voice, a willingness to throw shapes, and on the one song for which they shed their bass, a stage presence far beyond what indie bands normally offer up. They are so absurdly talented that you do not have to be Nostradamus to predict that the words ‘solo career’ will be raised sooner or later.

But right now? Divorce are the best young British band I’ve seen in an age. They’ve got an album out now, but they’re even better live.

From the most distant spot in the gods, Divorce were absolutely breathtaking

Usher has just completed ten nights at the O2. That’s 200,000 tickets. I have yet to encounter one person – everyone I know in the music industry included – who had any idea he was capable, after 30 years, of selling 200,000 tickets. And fair play to him, he spent a good 15 minutes of his set singing while roller-skating. Nick Cave could take some tips.

Usher does something extremely old-fashioned. He unapologetically sells sex, but without getting pornographic. There’s a kind of critical writing these days that tries to expunge sex as a primary motivator of pop preferring to frame it as intellectual rather than physical – god, all those essays about how ‘WAP’ (‘Wet Ass Pussy’) was a single about female empowerment, vagina as goddess, reclaiming autonomy.

Not Usher, whose largely female crowd melted before him, dazzled by his unblemished voice, fabulous physique, lovely moves, and – yes – sex appeal. They liked the songs, too, which was more than I did – R&B slow jamz, I suspect, will always leave me cold. But the show – a faux AI survey of Usher’s life up to 30 years from now – was a hoot. And it makes one realise, sometimes a cigar really is just a penis.