From The Curator at BlackFM
There is something agreeably theatrical about the notion of a “surround sound” experience, conjuring as it does images of velvet-seated screening rooms and audiophiles fussing over the precise angle of a speaker cone. Spotify, never an institution to let a good piece of branding go to waste, has borrowed the phrase for altogether more corporeal purposes: a live performance series designed, one assumes, to envelop an audience not in digitally rendered acoustics but in the rather more ancient pleasure of watching an artist work a room. The inaugural edition of Spotify’s Surround Sound Lagos unfolded across two nights at Livespot, and if the streaming giant wished to announce its arrival into live music programming with some ceremony, it could hardly have chosen better standard-bearers than Tems and Runtown.
The pairing was shrewd for reasons beyond mere star wattage. Both artists have, in recent years, become something of rare sightings on Lagos stages — a curious inversion, perhaps, given that the city remains the wellspring of the sound that carried each of them to global recognition. Their reappearance, then, carried the charge of genuine occasion rather than routine promotional churn.
Runtown’s Return to the Band, and to “Mad Over You”
Runtown took the second night, and by his own account it was one of some personal significance. “This is the first time in 10 years I am performing with my band, and I am looking forward to seeing my fans,” he said ahead of the show — a decade being no small interval in a career built, like so many in Afrobeats, on the propulsive energy of records rather than the slower cultivation of a live ensemble. He opened with “Lagos to Kampala” and “Gallardo” before threading his way through a set that touched “For Life,” “International Badman Killa,” “Unleash” and “Kini Issue,” a sequence that amounted to something of a guided tour through the various eras of his output.
Inevitably, the evening’s gravitational centre was “Mad Over You,” the 2016 hit that did as much as any single record to cement Runtown’s place in the Afrobeats canon that preceded the genre’s more recent global ascent. He performed it once within the set proper and then, as though the audience’s appetite had not been sated, again to close the night — a reprise that had the crowd singing the song back to him in full voice. For a performer whose public appearances have thinned in frequency, it was a set that allowed both artist and audience to survey a decade’s worth of hits in a single sitting.
Tems and the Long Shadow of For Broken Ears
The opening night belonged to Tems, whose set was constructed with evident care around the different chapters of a catalogue that, though not vast in the manner of longer-serving artists, has proven remarkably durable in the affection it commands. She reached back to her 2020 debut EP, For Broken Ears, for fan favourites “Ice T” and “Damages,” before delving further still into earlier material with “Mr Rebel” and “Try Me.” More recent releases, among them “Love Me JeJe” and “What You Need,” rounded out a set that traced an arc from bedroom experimentation to global recognition.
That bedroom origin was made explicit when Tems recalled the making of “Free Mind,” one of the standout tracks from her debut EP. “I remember making Free Mind on my bed, on my laptop, experimenting with chords and seeing what stuck,” she said. “The first two chords sounded so good, and it ignited melodies in me. Those melodies I made on my bed are what is in the song right now.” It is a small anecdote, but a telling one, illustrating the extent to which so much of the Afrobeats sound now filling stadiums and streaming charts the world over began life in far more modest surroundings — a laptop, a bed, an idea worth pursuing.
The performance, as reported by NotJustOk, also arrived roughly six years after the release of that debut project, a record that appeared shortly before Tems became the third artist selected for Spotify’s RADAR Africa programme in September 2020 — a scheme designed to champion emerging talent from the continent, and one that has since become a reasonably reliable barometer of artists on the ascent. At various points in the set, Tems ceded the songs to her audience, turning individual verses into communal sing-alongs and lending the evening an intimacy that larger, more polished productions can sometimes forfeit.
A Fittingly Nigerian Opening
There was a neatness to the choice of Tems and Runtown as the artists entrusted with launching Spotify Surround Sound Lagos. Tems remains one of the defining voices of Nigeria’s more recent breakthrough onto the global stage, a Grammy winner whose ascent has become something of a touchstone narrative for the genre’s international moment. Runtown, meanwhile, represents an earlier but no less formative chapter, his catalogue having helped shape the Afrobeats sound in the years before that global surge took hold. Between them, the two nights offered a compressed history lesson of sorts, delivered not in lecture form but in the considerably more agreeable medium of a live set.
Whether Spotify’s Surround Sound series becomes a fixture of the Lagos live calendar remains to be seen, but as opening statements go, this was a confident one — two artists, two distinct eras of Nigerian music, and an audience reminded that the city remains very much the beating heart of the sound it exported to the world.
Source: notjustok.com. Keep listening on BlackFM Afrobeats radio.
