2024-07-24 17:05:07
Liberation, autonomy, power. The inscriptions sprayed on the large installation, which occupies most of the main stage of the Colors of Ostrava festival, describe the main themes of the concert of the British star Sam Smith. He identifies as non-binary and uses they/their pronouns. The show charts the evolution from a heartbroken man to an artist celebrating his own emancipation.
The Ostrava performance, which was the culmination of the second festival day and which, according to the ČTK agency, was watched by up to 40,000 people, seemed to represent the journey of their lives at the same time. The arrival of the main star is first spectacularly announced by men with red flaming torches. After a few familiar piano notes are played, Sam Smith emerges atop the installation of a reclining male body. They open the show right away with their perhaps best-known hit, Stay With Me, which does not deny its gospel inspiration.
The ten-year-old ballad represents a time when they were constantly confessing painful rejections and breakups. Today, they sing significantly less about a broken heart, and they have slightly modified the text of the song – they rewrote the phrase “I’m just a man”, considering that they have been using other pronouns for the past five years, to “honey, understand”. But the audience at Colors didn’t even have to notice this small change. The chorus of the notorious song was sung so loudly that the first hit had Sam Smith almost out of work.
In the song, they begged their lover to stay with them. When they later received a Grammy Award for the song, they thanked the person who broke their hearts. Since then, they have moved even further in the themes of their work, yet they say they still enjoy singing the song. “It’s never stopped entertaining me. Every time I sing it, the meaning changes. The phrase ‘stay with me’ can mean a million different things and it’s been with me like an old friend,” Sam Smith told queer website Pink News. “It’s nice to know that sometimes we can change the past,” they added to the new version of the text.
With the knowledge of the words of other songs, it is already weaker for the fans, who were played by Sam Smith in the Czech Republic for the very first time. Some of their calls for the audience to sing for them get only a hesitant response. Still, Sam Smith blow kisses to the crowd and blurt out corny phrases about how happy they are to be playing here, that the audience is great, and that all the beauty is accentuated by the waxing white moon in the sky.
But the singer’s charisma and their happy, sincere smile on their faces make you believe them, even if you have heard something similar countless times in your life. Moreover, it is evident that Sam Smith thoroughly enjoy performing in front of the crowd.
Sam Smith attracted an estimated 40,000 people under the Colors of Ostrava main stage. | Photo: Eugene Zhyvchik
They also confirm their vocal qualities and the fact that they sound perhaps even more velvety live than on a studio recording. For the desired dramatic effect, they can go from baritone to tenor in a second. Music critic Jim Farber wrote of them that they are not at all afraid to sound feminine, which is characteristic of their gender identity. In addition, they often cite singers Whitney Houston or Adele as inspiration and say that they didn’t really listen to any male vocalists in their childhood and adolescence. “We only allowed these ‘massive voices’,” they summed up ten years ago, and today their own “massive voice” dominates the Lower Vítkovice region.
Danced breakups
The show for the Gloria tour, with which they have been touring the world for a year and a half, is conceived conceptually – divided into several thematic chapters, from songs in which Sam Smith begs the one who broke their heart to stay with them a little longer, through those in which resorts to regrets, to hits celebrating sexuality, emancipation and self-acceptance. In them, they confidently sing that they “definitely didn’t come here looking for friends”. For them personally, the whole performance is mainly about freedom. “The freedom to love who you want, sing the songs you want and wear what you like,” he tells the audience.
They confirm this inner freedom, which they have found in their identity, several times in Ostrava, when they change from a black suit to a voluminous black or iridescent robe. After coming out in 2019, they remembered a stage of adolescence when they said they did not own a single piece of men’s clothing and went to school with makeup. Now they move from more masculine to more feminine positions and costumes so smoothly that they confirm only one thing – clothes have no gender.
Even in the second chapter of the concert, Sam Smith returns to the hits from the first album In The Lonely Hour, which they re-released this year on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of its success. They sing the piano ballad Lay Me Down about a loved one who has left them as a duet with one of the backing vocalists, Ladonna Harley-Peters, whom she lists as her very good friend. In another, already brisker composition, they reproach the addressee: look what you forced us to do, we are with someone new.
The concert slowly progresses in the third act and the atmosphere on the red-lit stage changes dramatically. This part opens with the dance song Gimme, which Sam Smith prepared for his last album Gloria together with musicians called Jessie Reyez and Koffee. Five excellent dancers are also added. In places they move very lasciviously, the two even kiss during the song. Sam Smith, this time dressed in a black fishing vest, confidently sing “give me everything I want”.
In this part of the concert, more dance electronica penetrates the music, typical of their current work. Thanks to the elaborate dramaturgical arc, the evening is never boring. After the seductive Gimme comes the song Lose You, also from the latest album – again a breakup song, but thanks to the danceable sound it seems more emancipatory than painful.
Among other things, Sam Smith sang Latch at Colors of Ostrava. Photo: Eugene Zhyvchik | Video: Martin Dybala
Queer anthem of love
In the last twenty minutes, the show is a pure celebration of self-acceptance. Sam Smith knows a thing or two about how hard it is to get to. In addition to struggling with their gender identity until coming out five years ago, they were bullied at school for their appearance, especially their larger breasts, and underwent liposuction as a 12-year-old. As a gay boy, they probably didn’t have it easy even in the Catholic environment he comes from.
The fact that they moved in the environment of church choirs in their childhood and adolescence, Sam Smith remembers when they sing the composition Gloria inspired by Christian choral music. They just say about it – somewhat subversively given the form – that it’s their queer love anthem.
The logical conclusion of the show is the hit Unholy, which could be loosely translated as “desecrated”. Right after Stay With Me, it has the most plays on the Spotify platform, specifically 1.5 billion, and in the last year, among other things, it has mastered the social networks TikTok and Instagram in a big way.
For the last song, Sam Smith change into a corset bodysuit with knee highs and have a necklace with a big ‘sex’ written on it from one of the dancers. Then they also put on a hat with devil horns and hold pitchforks. For example, at the Grammy Awards, conservatives were outraged by this costume, but in the atheistic Czech Republic, few people probably stopped to think about it during the concert.
Some critics also found the music video for the song, which Sam Smith created with trans artist Kim Petras, scandalous. It takes place in a lascivious cabaret aptly named The Body Shop. But the fact is, thanks to her, they became the first non-binary and trans artists to win a Grammy Award and reach the top of the most prestigious American music chart, the Billboard Hot 100.
Gloria’s successful hour and a half long show is like a cross-section of a fascinating career and personal development. At the same time, it represents the path to self-love and inner freedom. But not as a sudden enlightenment or something that can be achieved with the help of self-development books, but as a painful journey full of ups, downs and mistakes. Sam Smith has apparently already found his “unholy grail”.