Love in the air for Post Malone's Valentine's show

[rating]4[/rating]

It was Valentine’s Night in Dublin and all the love in the room was directed at the bearish figure wreathed in facial tattoos and wearing a shirt festooned with shamrocks.

Post Malone started his European tour with a bone fide claim to be the biggest brand in rap in 2019. His hook-up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the Grammys a few days previously had confirmed his elevation to the highest tier of pop royalty. It was an incredible ascent by an artist who had uploaded his first single to Soundcloud just four years ago (and who played the tiny Academy third stage down the road from the 3Arena in 2016).

His rise from the obscurity of the Dallas suburbs had meanwhile taken on soap opera trappings following the incarceration by emigration officials of his collaborator 21 Savage on Super Bowl weekend. Malone – born Austin Malone – duly gave a shout out to his imprisoned friend as he plunged into the hit they wrote together, Rockstar.

“21 f***ing Savage,” he bellowed as flames jetted into the air and he walked to the back of the ramp jutting into the crowd to symbolically smash a guitar.

As with much of his material Rockstar was a rap track that seemed uncomfortable in its skin. Over a lurching beat that sounded forever in danger of toppling in on itself, he counted the way overnight fame can pull at the loose threads of your soul. It was a hip hop number that seemed to want to be something else – a face-crunching rock ballad possibly.

That was no surprise considering Malone has listed as influences Nirvana, Fleet Foxes and, a bit improbably, experimental folk musician Bon Iver. He certainly brought stadium rock showmanship, the evening beginning with the artist concealed within a giant shoebox-like edifice.

It rose, emitting dry ice and blinding light and there, in the middle, stood Malone. He had dressed for the occasion, with an untucked shirt covered in clovers. Occasionally he sipped from a red cup –it probably wasn’t a leftover Christmas Starbucks – and even sparked up (explaining that he would be fined $4000 for breaching the no-smoking rule).

Hip hop gatekeepers are tremendously sniffy about Malone, who happens not to have grown up in a crack house and isn’t above slathering his music in mosh-pit guitars. Here, it was the breadth of the material that was striking. Wow was an r’n b heat-seeker while Pyscho and I Fall Apart dripped with suburban metalhead angst.

This wasn’t music to change your life – but it was tremendous fun. And the enthusiasm with which the audience responded confirmed that, whatever the elitists think, fans’ love affair with Post Malone’s music has little sign of fading.