To celebrate the life and work of R&B and neo-soul legend D'Angelo, who has died aged 51, writer and filmmaker Dave Tynan revisits an essay penned following a memorable live performance by the enigmatic singer, at the 02 Brixton Academy in London back in 2012.
It was snowing in Brixton the night of February 4th. Inside the Academy, thousands of people had their eyes fixed on Michael Eugene Archer. He was seated behind an organ, playing a gorgeous song called One Mo Gin about a past love, about that lingering feeling after a relationship's died, after you've each taken a bit of each other and moved on. D'Angelo softly sang the lines
I know a lot of things have changed since last I've seen you,
Some's good, Some for the bad
The crowd sung this last line and the R&B Jesus went to speak but instead he laughed and gave the auditorium a smile too big for regret. It was a beautifully casual acknowledgement of all the years that had gone by. It will remain one of the most touching things I'll see in music this year or any other. But let’s do the back-story.
Rest in Power, D'Angelo 🕊️
— Jazz Is Dead (@jazzisdeadco) October 14, 2025
A true Maestro — his voice, vision, & spirit reshaped the sound of a generation.
He didn’t just make music — he built a language of soul, rooted in tradition but entirely his own.
Fly high, D'.#DAngelo pic.twitter.com/Wni7TSBOjp
In 1995 D’Angelo’s first album came out. Brown Sugar showed a young man with a scary talent, absolutely fully formed. He could do it all at 22 and he was pushing an organic sound that had seemed lost from the 80s on. It was a complete musical statement and he was straight up on a pedestal. Footage from those years shows D’Angelo happy behind his keyboard, a handsome man but not a sex symbol. It’s worth remembering that. That "V" and that video, still burned into the retina of a generation of R&B fans, was a one-album deal on Voodoo. Maybe we should have seen the signs: it was five years until the next record. With Voodoo he found purity in dirt. I got it on vinyl and it's in every sense a long player, an album birthed in Electric Lady Studios with each track sliding into the next. With hindsight we can see this was the first great album of that decade. The album’s full of long, earthy songs, groove-based, slow-cooked and rich as pulled pork. It went further than his first album in every direction. It was soaked in soul and funk but it sucked in the grit of rap too. He was always darker, and deeper, than his peers. This was what people didn't expect when they wanted a "conscious" rapper on Left and Right and instead they got a pair of thug charmers in Method Man and Redman.
Christgau coined the term messiah after seeing D'Angelo at the end of that incendiary 2000 tour. But surely the worst demons are reserved for people who really believe in the supernatural. It’s hard to escape the idea that the son of two generations of Pentecostal preachers, who'd seen people possessed in church as a child, believed. Here was a man who spoke with bleeding sincerity of how he felt the spirit of Marvin in him, of his childhood dream the night Gaye died and how in that dream Gaye chose him to take up his mantle and lead soul. One of the most revealing things listening to that now is when he takes care to describe how his idol appeared: "a very handsome, thin Marvin." In the interviews around that time he often trails off, not wanting people "looking at me like I'm some spook." That this didn't sound ridiculous goes some way towards explaining what he came to represent, a lone paragon of integrity at the turn of the millenium.
I'm not sure if it was the best concert I've ever witnessed. But I'm certain it was the best single performance.
He was wary of his idols. He felt the ghost and he knew the bloody biography. He could see the parallels, the dangers, but he couldn't dodge them. So maybe it was the weight of the past or image issues or both and a hundred other things but the man who never seemed to belong to his own era disappeared from it. And so followed years of false starts and all the clichés that musical genius succumbs to; cocaine, arrests and rehab. Most infamously, that wasted mug shot where he looked like ODB on extra doughnuts. He'd gone Kurtz up James River. Rumours came and went, more or less suggesting he was in a shack deep in the woods of rural Virginia as the world turned and the years went by.
Then with little fanfare, a short tour of Europe was announced. Twelve years since an album. Tickets went in minutes and I missed them. Then I saw a poster for a second date and snapped up two, fully expecting a refund down the line. I told my friend and he booked a flight. We'd made a pact during the wilderness years. Some things you've got to see. In 2012, nothing’s a mystery any more. We know everything five minutes ago in our tantrum of an information age. But his last concerts came a full three years before Facebook was even launched. Jack Hamilton described reading ?uestlove's Twitter feed the night of the first concert as being "like following someone having dinner with a unicorn." And then he went and fell off the stage in Amsterdam before the gig even started. That made sense; of course he'd play one gig and then the rest would be cancelled. But they weren’t. So through the snow to Brixton and an eager, mixed crowd. We'd to put up with Kojo first, a Hackney and hackneyed comedian who happily scraped the barrel, asking who was there to see what D’Angelo looked like. This guy might be the black Andy Parsons. The crowd stewed, impatient and excited.
Finally. It was a fairly soft landing of Voodoo’s opener Playa Playa, D’Angelo starting behind a keyboard, a shadow, high and back on the stage. Then he moved to the front, the band kicked into a upbeat, pacy take on Feel Like Makin' Love and doubts evaporated. The crowd roared the chorus back at him. There were women here that have never wanted to see a performer in the flesh this much. How does he look? It shouldn’t matter and it didn’t, except that this did seem one of the major causes of the vanishing. Also, albeit in a different guise, he does look extraordinary. He's not the lithe, stage humping, hircine poster boy of yore. He appeared as a raffish Pirate King, hat low, leather draped over his shoulders. There’s a solid trunk to his body now and his arms are huge, a Minotaur in eyeliner.
Watch: D'Angelo onstage at the Brixton Academy in 2012
Did he take the roof off? To me, after a few drinks, it always looks like there's no roof on this venue anyway - the castellations above the stage give way to an inky black void, which gives the odd impression of being outside even though you know it's too hot for that in here. But yeah, this was a performance with majesty in it. Like any truly great singer his voice contains multitudes. He's lost nothing. He’s still got a huge range, still mastering about five voices to test and push his songs. The Prince comparisons are accurate in the falsetto moments. There's that Cerberus rumble that growls up from his core and roars out of him. The Marvin coos. There's also that weird wide mouthed thing that has a serpentine, almost Axl Rose quality. Above all, the screams where he holds nothing back and leaves nothing behind. It all means you never know what’s coming next.
The abiding memory of it all was thick slabs of funk. Voodoo is still the foundation upon which this set was built. Chicken Grease is vital, as representative of the show as anything. A sweaty, sticky cover of Parliament's I’ve Been Watching You sprawled out for ten minutes. It was around here a girl near us shouted about how horny she found herself. One of the new tracks, Sugar Daddy, bounces and thumps with a bossy piano line and provided some nice interplay with the band, especially when he danced with backing singer Kendra Foster, more cat woman than Anne Hathaway could ever be. Jesse Johnson of The Time was on guitar. Dressed in an outrageous pimp outfit, like he'd strolled off 125th in the '78 and straight into the Academy. He traded solos with D’Angelo, one of the rock signifiers new to this tour. There was a real feeling these were some of the best musicians on the planet playing for a guy they think the world of. Remember that Brown Sugar is all him, every instrument played by him, Prince-style. Speaking of Minneapolis, Charade was a gorgeous Purple Pop Waterfall and the catchiest of the new songs.
S**t Damn Motherf**ker is now nearly a movement in its own. Was this strategic, to give himself a break? He wasn't always present as drummer Chris "Daddy" Dave and bass supremo Pino Palladino tore into long solos, but equally he never looked tired or compromised in his movement as he roamed the stage. He wasn’t going to dance throughout but this was a choice. When he settled back behind the keys he gave us the hits suite and crammed (some felt relegated) Brown Sugar and Voodoo highlights into a medley that’s entire running time barely matched S.D.M. But the crowd lapped up the sing-a-long as he rolled seamlessly from one hit to another. Then he hit the first key of Untitled. Game over. The crowd erupted. He kept playing, leaned into the microphone for the first line - and sang absolutely nothing. He pulled back, grinning. He'd got us. Brixton screamed as he laughed.
The beast of an encore, Brown Sugar kidnapped by James Brown, strutting and hitting hard, must have gone on for ten minutes. It could have been longer. He danced, he screamed and he flashed the stabs on his fingers and the band punched them out. The lights went down, the crowd roared, there was a pause and then he did it all again and again. By then he was down to a net vest that reached nearly to his knees. He played with it, pulling it around himself as the song reached climax, teasing us. He didn't rip it off, though much of the crowd wanted him to and a few would have fainted. He's not falling into that trap again. If it means we'll get more albums and tours, and it's never looked more likely, then he should never go topless again.
A baggy second act, absolutely, but there wasn't a minute here that wasn't thrilling. There was no weirdly apt cover of Space Oddity as he did in Paris a few nights before. And I still want a full, eight minute, Untitled not just as a closer to the medley. It's a perfect song.
So if it was all less about a singer than before the obscene level of stagecraft was absolutely intact. There's more hats, more guitars and more clothes; in musical and personal style he’s following his heroes into rockier territory, Sly and Prince most of all. This tour could well be a half way house between albums. Let’s hope we’ll be able to look back on it as that. The strangest thing of all was how easy, genuine and just plain effortless it appeared for him. It was wonderfully clear how joyous he finds playing live. It’s been a long walk to the stage.
It was still snowing in Brixton when we left. I'm not sure if it was the best concert I've ever witnessed. But I'm certain it was the best single performance. He was in his pomp, as counter-intuitive as that sounds.
D’Angelo is still, if he wants to be, the man holding the torch. He’s not forty yet. He's one of the most important musicians of his generation and if he can navigate a path through the darkness, if he can keep the ghosts off his back, everyone will be better for it, him most of all. He's spent too long in the pit.
We Used To Dance Here by Dave Tynan is out now
