Gig review: Dermot Kennedy at First Direct Bank Arena, Leeds

Dermot Kennedy wants his audience to know that he does not take their patronage for granted. Gazing up the topple-tiered seats of the First Direct Bank Arena, he lets out a visible exhale that reverbs back down the microphone. “When you go away to make music, it’s never a safe assumption that people will still care,” he confesses.

Three albums in, the Rathcoole-raised star’s profile shows no signs of slippage. His latest effort, April’s The Weight of the Woods, shot straight to number one in the United Kingdom; this arena jaunt comes three years after he first stepped onto the touring rung of the nation’s shed venues, touting an angst-folk anthem milieu that has only grown more pervasively ubiquitous throughout the country’s musical landscape since he last surfaced for air.

That said, there is a sense that Kennedy has been usurped within the confines of his Celtic-rock commercialism. Former second-fiddle support Noah Kahan has effectively outstripped him as a festival-topping draw; none of his recent singles have troubled the upper echelons of the charts; his album earned surprising pushback from fans seeking sonic redefinition against revitalisation. This return, despite a lusty turnout, is less of a slam-dunk on paper than necessarily anticipated.

It is a different matter in practice. Any fears of an anaemic misfire are put fleetly to bed with a calculated explosion of big-hall pop-polish. Kennedy may technically gamble on a show that culls over half of its material from the past few months alone, but amid a stage bedecked with fake rocks and shrubbery, guitar strapped like a rifle across his chest, he works it with the prostrated devotion of a novice cardinal. Honest rattles out of the traps with greyhound-on-speed velocity, ricocheting off the walls and roof; Wasted expands a hip-hop gait into communal bombast, phone-lights linked in ley lines reaching up to the rafters.

The singer clearly relishes the reception, bold enough to dispatch biggest hit Outnumbered inside the first twenty minutes to incredulous shrieks. He cribs from more than the obvious influences of David Gray and Mumford and Sons too; Turnstile repurposes Bryan Adams’ Run to You around a steady stomp, while Lost plays a dynamite coda that twists its piano-theatre balladry into art-glam noise.

As he closes out a shiveringly affective Embers atop a skeletal turf-edged platform, Kennedy bows his head, seemingly overwhelmed by the screams of applause. The people still do care.