Live music review: Jens Lekman

4/5

Things are always complicated with Jens Lekman. The Gothenburg troubadour became an cult sensation with his 2007 album Night Falls Over Kortedala. Yet he was horrified by the quasi-fame that followed and, plunged into a melancholic funk, fled to Australia to get his head straight.

He soon had the opposite problem. When a sour 2010 follow-up, I Know What Love Isn’t, sent his fanbase running for the hills, it occurred to Lekman that perhaps he wasn’t as opposed to overnight success as he had imagined.

With the record tanking he found himself at a landfill watching, Alan Partridge-style, as dozens of unsold CDs were mulched.

Recently turned 36, with greying temples and a deep-set gaze, he has, it seems, finally achieved happiness. Or at least learned to stop fretting about the trajectory of his life and career. That was obvious from this year’s Life Will See You Now — a zippy collection that found joy in the everyday and even managed to turn a friend’s fight with cancer into a spirits-raising ditty.

Lekman was just as upbeat on the first night of his European tour. Grinning beneath a baseball bat, the singer led his all-female band through rollicking edited highlights from the new LP. These swerved from the joyous ‘Hotwire the Ferris Wheel’ to the tinglingly perky ‘What’s That Perfume That You Wear’ via the bittersweet aforementioned cancer song ‘Evening Prayer’.

“How many people were here when I played in 2007?,” he asked, chuckling as a handful punters cried out in the affirmative.

He was introducing ‘The Opposite of Hallelujah’, his big “hit” from Kortedala and a song that remains his definitive statement, with its happy-sad synth line and wide-eyed lyrics. Lekman is back and, if his audience was thrilled at his return, he appeared even happier yet.