Angel Haze LIVE @ Heaven, Charing Cross 11.3.14

Tonight a predominantly female audience has turned up to watch Angel Haze perform at Heaven, with a couple of bearded men thrown in for good measure. As my gig companion wryly puts it ‘the Candy Bar may have shut down but the lezzas of London can all be found here tonight’, herself included.

Angel Haze’s DJ takes the stage first playing tracks such as TNGHT’s Higher Ground. As the beat thumps and the music builds, eyes start to close and heads start to sway. By the time Haze enters, the crowd have been whipped into a tribal like frenzy.

At the tender age of 22 Haze has already had her fair share of life experience which she references throughout her music. Raised in Detroit and brought up in what she describes as a cult (the Pentecostal Greater Apostolic Church), she has spoken about fighting discrimination from all aspects of her life, for being black, Native American and a female rap artist in a misogynistic industry. Not wanting to define herself she says she “absolutely rejects labels of race, gender and sexuality” and stated “love is love, love doesn’t have a sexuality” on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.

The first track of the night is Echelon where, with cutting lyrics, Angel Haze raps about the bitchy fashion industry. The crowd let out an intentionally pervy cheer as she removes her jacket to reveal a white shirt, gold chains and torn black jeans. She’s all big smiles and the crowd are all big cheers, “Thank you for supporting the fuck out of me” she shouts over the noise.

There are glimpses in Haze’s lyrics of a lingering bitter taste from the past, ‘I’m Satan, and I’mma take your ass to church now’ she declares in New York, the song that in her words “made me pop off”. The addictive hooks of Deep Sea Diver and Sing About Me get everyone dancing, the whole room moving except for a lone red helium balloon that loiters by the ceiling. During her cover of Beyonce’s Drunk In Love, she mixes up the lyrics grinding on a ‘surfboard, skateboard, Tom Ford’ and as for Jay-Z’s controversial rap, this is replaced with her own, in my opinion, better version.

At one point Angel Haze pulls a fan out of the crowd and onto the stage, serenading the bewildered individual who awkwardly shuffles from foot to foot, mouthing, ‘What the fuck?’ to her friends when Haze isn’t looking. Hilarious and entertaining but not to be repeated. The night ends with Battle Cry, Angel Haze’s new single featuring Sia. She leaves the stage momentarily only to appear above my head on the staircase, arms waving and hair swinging.

Although Haze has a voice that isn’t quite strong enough to hit all the vocal notes and a tendency to be a little preachy between songs, her rap is fierce and her performance infectious. She quickly creates a rapport with the crowd, whose energy she feeds off and throws back at them tenfold. Dedicating her final song of the night, Black Dahlia, to her mother, all eyes remain fixed on Angel Haze. She ends, hand raised high in a peace sign as the crowd extend their arms to mirror it back.