Ben Howard is a man of few words.
It’s surprising, really. After the runaway success of his debut album Every Kingdom, you’d expect the twenty-eight year old singer-songwriter to be a pretty cocksure young man. After all, he’s already scored a slew of hit singles, and his sophomore album I Forget Where We Were debuted at the top of the UK album charts upon its release earlier in the year. His live show, too, is a roaring beast – packed full of reverb, and with enough electric guitars to make a Gibson dealer drool, it’s a masterclass in how to take a six-thousand capacity outdoor arena and turn it into something that’s intimate and personal.
Howard is a modest live performer. His onstage chat is, at times, barely intelligible, and he has a habit of never quite finishing his sentences. Despite this, he manages to be a charming and endearing frontman – he seems genuinely surprised when the crowd start singing back the chorus to I Forget Where We Were, for example, and his somewhat-awkward mumbling between songs is a testament to his modesty and grounded nature. To say that he lets the music do the talking is an understatement – when speaking to the crowd he’s virtually unintelligible, yet when he’s in the midst of belting out a chorus he’s as loud and confident a frontman as any we’ve seen for years.
Musically, he’s flawless; crunching guitars and pounding drums are paired with Howard’s distinctive vocals to create a true wall of sound that’s quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, and the efforts of his formidable backing band ensure that Howard’s music stretches to every corner of the sold-out Eden Project. If ever a venue and an artist were made to go together, it was the Eden Project and Ben Howard – Howard’s reverb-clad atmospheric folk music is a perfect fit for the surreal surroundings of Eden’s biomes and numerous exotic flowers, and Eden’s intimate surroundings were seemingly built for the stylings of personal and raw singer-songwriters like Ben Howard.
We’ve only got one gripe with Howard’s live show. His set stretches for nearly two hours, yet he only airs three tracks from his breakthrough album Every Kingdom. These three tracks are the arguable highlights of the set – the capacity crowd noticeably perk up for top ten single Keep Your Head Up, and encore track The Fear is greeted with a roar that matches anything we’ve heard at an arena-sized pop gig. Despite this, Howard seems keener to air obscure cuts from his second album than he does . First album singles Old Pine and Only Love were left out, yet he manages to find time to play a cover of Sharon Van Etten’s Every Time the Sun Comes Up. It’s a shame, and we hope that he fiddles with his setlist to provide a more balanced and fan-friendly show by the time his next UK tour rolls around.
Ben Howard could be the boy who lives next door, or that mate of your brother who always brings his guitar to your barbecue. He could be the barman in your local pub, or the guy you used to sit next to in secondary school. He’s ordinary, in the best of ways – yes, he’s a supremely talented singer-songwriter, but at the same time he manages to retain a sense of seemingly genuine surprise that he’s in the position he’s in. It’s part of his charm, it’s part of him, and we hope that he never changes.