I saw John Legend perform at Glasgow's Hydro
A trio of backing singers signalled his entrance by teasing vocals before the Ohio-born star appeared dressed in a satin suit.
He then asked: 'What's up Glasgow?' - before demanding, 'Get on your feet, c'mon,' to perform Get Lifted.
(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.)
(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.)
(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.)
(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.) Used to Love You - the 2004 debut he wrote and produced with rapper Kanye West - then followed.
With a little swagger, he then launched into the tracks that featured on his 2004 debut Get Lifted including the Snoop Dogg featured I Can Change and Alright.
(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.)
(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.)
(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.)
The night was about celebrating the two decades since that album's release, and vocally Legend has never sounded better.
This was particularly evident when he took it back to church for a performance of Take My Hand, Precious Lord. His voice was just beautiful.
(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.)
(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.)
He then laughed: 'I am having so much fun going back 20 years with you all.'
This moment marked the start of him reminiscing about his career.
He revealed he played piano when he was just starting out on Lauren Hill's Everything is Everything before demonstrating the beat he created with his voice for Kanye's Jesus Walks - which featured on the rapper's debut The College Dropout - and the sound was quite something.
He also boasted his CV included writing credits on Estelle's American Boy while he sang background vocals on Alicia Keys' You Don't Know My Name.
(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.)
(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.)
This section of the show lifted the mood instantly as the atmosphere up until that point had been rather lacklustre.
A crowd that small in the Hydro just gets lost, and it showed.
READ NEXT: I saw Gary Barlow perform in Glasgow's Armadillo - my verdict
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(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.)
(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.)
(Image: John Legend performs at the Ovo Hydro in Glasgow, May 2025. Picture by Calum Buchan.)
Ordinary People however, impressed with the audience modestly singing along while the Meghan Trainor duet Like I'm Gonna Lose You showcased the prowess in his voice.
Surprising a fan, he got her on stage for a dance, and she seized the moment making the audience laugh.
Finishing things off, he showed off his own dance moves again on Green Light which featured Outkast's Andre 3000 while All of Me was the moment of the night.
He signed off: 'It's been so beautiful hanging out with you.'
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The Guardian
5 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘I am tough' – Emma Raducanu on legacy of her US Open win, stalking ordeal and why therapy won't help her
For four arduous years, so much of Emma Raducanu's life has played out in public. Every decision relating to her career has been dissected and debated. The most banal details surrounding her personal life have been transfigured into headline news. In order to find herself on and off the tennis court, Raducanu has had to learn how to tune out the noise, which at times can be deafening. Only one month ago at Wimbledon, the discourse surrounding the 22-year-old reached diabolical lows. Even though her on-court performances were strong, it was impossible to escape the speculation surrounding her personal life. In the bowels of center court at the Cincinnati Open, I offer my own blunt perspective: I have never cringed as much as I did while watching people trying to pry into her romantic relationships at the All England Club. 'Yeah, and Cam's questions, too,' Raducanu responds, laughing. 'That was terrible. Terrible.' Raducanu was referring to her compatriot Cameron Norrie's post-match press conference, when a reporter asked him whether he was dating Raducanu. Norrie, who was being supported in his player box that day by his long-term partner, was as baffled as he was bemused. For Raducanu, though, such brazen intrusiveness from strangers has simply become part of her everyday life. 'I know, I know,' she says, smiling. 'I guess I'm like, it comes with the territory, people being so curious. I think they're more curious about this news than any tennis results and tennis news. But I just keep myself to myself, my private life to one side. It's always funny when people try to find something out, but I try not to read into it so much.' That curiosity is not isolated to the internet and tabloids. When Raducanu is out in London, paparazzi photographers will find her, even when she is doing nothing more than stepping on to a 345 bus somewhere in Wandsworth. 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Everything leads back to those three fateful weeks at the US Open in the summer of 2021, where Raducanu became the first qualifier to win a grand slam title. The spoils of victory were significant but Raducanu's rapid success yielded considerable challenges. Along with the difficult results and constant criticism, her body constantly betrayed her. In 2023, after struggling physically for a long time, she underwent surgeries on both wrists and her left ankle. While she tried to prove herself on the court, Raducanu says, people within her team would tell her she wasn't tough: 'I was obviously like: 'Oh, no, I am tough enough.'' says Raducanu. 'And it wasn't good to hear, because I always prided myself on being a hard worker and being tough. And I believe I am. 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'I think it's been four years now, I don't think it's fully gone away. Maybe in a few years, maybe when I'm older, more mature, but it's hard to put that aside completely. It's always in the back of your mind, but it's more just being aware of those thoughts and then not letting it crash your day or ruin the work that you're doing, and bringing it back to what I'm doing now, and the process.' Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Considering her many difficulties, an obvious question is whether sports psychology or therapy have been a part of her life over the past few years: 'I've tried. I've tried,' she says. 'I've been obviously recommended a lot to do it with what I went through. It was something that not many people, well, actually no one has gone through, which is probably the reason that I did like two sessions and I stopped. I was like: 'Look, these guys, they don't relate.' And, to be honest, no other athlete has done what I've done, so I don't know why I'm taking advice from them. So I was like: 'OK, well, the only person who can help me is myself.'' For a long time the four defining cities of Raducanu's life were listed in her biographies across her social media platforms. Her parents, Ion and Renee, originally come from Bucharest, Romania, and Shenyang, China, respectively while she was born in Toronto, Canada, and grew up in London, England. Her mother's solo immigration from China to Canada has been an inspirational tale throughout her life. 'I would say it's funny when people ask where you're from,' she says. 'Obviously, I feel British. I've always grown up there, But there are certain things, the way I think, I don't think I am completely. So you have a little question about your identity. But I try not to read too much into it and try to just take the best from all the different worlds that I've been exposed to and grown up in.' Regardless of the subject at hand, Raducanu frequently notes the support and significance of her parents. She describes her upbringing as rigid and strict, but their tough love has made her the person she is today: 'I was always brought up with really high standards, high expectations of myself, not much sympathy,' says Raducanu. 'So when I was younger, that was tough, and even now. But I think it really shaped me to be the player I am, the person I am; pretty down to earth. They never got impressed by anything glitzy or high or anything.' Both Raducanu's parents worked in finance and they passed on their numerical, logical mindsets. Over the past few years, however, part of her evolution as an adult has been understanding herself as a person. 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She speaks effusively about the great enjoyment she has found in her consistent daily work and she has thrown herself into becoming the best player she can be each day. Raducanu's results are reflective of that shift and her ranking is clearly on the rise. Her time in Cincinnati, her first week with her new coach, Francisco Roig, ended with a colossal three-hour battle with Aryna Sabalenka, the world No 1, where she narrowly lost 7-6 in the final set. Over the next few days, she will return to New York for the US Open more self-assured than she has been since she won the title. Our second conversation ends with a final question on Raducanu's ambitions for the next few years beyond her results. After a beat, she shrugs. The hope, she says, is that the passion and joy she now feels each day about her daily work will endure. 'I want to continue for the next few years, to just keep enjoying because I would rather not do anything else or be anywhere else,' she says, shrugging. 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STV News
2 hours ago
- STV News
Lewis Capaldi was 'living a life he couldn't afford' before comeback
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Scotsman
4 hours ago
- Scotsman
Dan Gunn on reconstructing the life of Muriel Sparks through letters
Few people have immersed themselves in the lives of great writers as thoroughly as Edinburgh-born academic Dan Gunn. Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... First, there were the 25 years spent putting together the four-volume selection of Samuel Beckett's letters. He finished that in 2016, but two years later started work on the letters of Muriel Spark. The first of two volumes is published later this month, and for Spark aficionados, it's pure gold. The letters don't have all the answers. There aren't any surviving ones from before 1944, so there isn't anything about her Edinburgh childhood, adolescence, marriage, emigration to Southern Rhodesia (now ZImbabwe), motherhood, or the collapse there of her marriage to her manic depressive, violent husband or her wartime intelligence work. There isn't even too much about her 1954 mental breakdown and subsequent conversion to Catholicism or the six weeks in which she wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Yet if you want to follow her through the 1950s, watch her hitting her stride as a writer in the most transformative decade of her life, when she moves from being an unknown poet to a literary superstar on both sides of the Atlantic, the letters are enormously important. Read them, and you can almost see the self-confidence grow within her. At least that's what I thought as I followed her epistolary trail, noting how she switched from asking advice from Alan Maclean, the first editor of her books, to lambasting his failure to promote them properly. I've never read such sustained, imperious, angry eloquence. But perhaps, hints Gunn, it wasn't quite so simple. 'I was talking the other day with Alan Jenkins [a poet who had also known Spark] and I said that in this volume of her letters (1944-63) she's not that confident: she has doubts about her writing and her potential. And he said no, she never doubted her own genius. 'I think he's right, but I'm also right. I think she has an instinctive belief in her own utterly special way of looking at the world. How she translates that vision into writing is something else. When she's 14 and she wins an [Edinburgh-wide] poetry prize she already knows that's her path but it's only when she really gets going with prose and maybe only after two or three novels that she really gets a sense of 'Wow, this is it! I'm on the path and it's recursive: it comes back.'' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Other writers might kowtow to their publishers, conscious of the debt they owe them in getting their work into print, especially when – as with Spark - they changed their own rules just to do so. She was never like that. Here she is, in typically blistering form, on 13 November 1961, just after the publication of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, telling Macmillan's why she wants to change some relatively minor detail of her contract: 'I know of no other writer on your list but myself," she writes, "who has had the opportunity to build an intelligent career in the world, or to get married, and who has consciously or deliberately set these safeties aside and endured poverty, and taken the risk of failure, in order to write well. 'It is not a spare-time hobby I am engaged in, but something for which I have had to sacrifice pleasures, and continually have to give up pleasures to do, and no matter how successful I become, I shall always have to make these sacrifices. It is not the kind of work that comes from a compromised life.' The letter, I should point out, continues in this rather magnificent vein for a full eight pages of Gunn's book. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The contrast with Beckett is enormous, Gunn says. 'He thought success was just a terrible mistake, that somehow they'd got it wrong. Once somebody published him, he didn't even consider moving. But Muriel believed in her success, and when it comes to publishers she does tend to think there are greener pastures somewhere else. She had great business acumen. I've transcribed hundreds if not thousands of her business letters, and though I didn't include many of them, cumulatively they're surprising - particularly as she doesn't write bestsellers, pot boilers, genre fiction. Her novels are too strange, too singular, and she never repeats herself. She writes the book she needs to write, and then says to her agents and publishers, 'You have one job and one job only - to make me money.'' Muriel Spark in 1983 | Getty Images This isn't as arrogant as it sounds, he says. ' I try to understand it in the context of her being a woman who had to support her family in a world of pretty creepy men, a lot of whom are trying to have at her in one way or another.' (Even, says her most recent biographer, Frances Wilson, to the extent of attempted rape.) Gunn met Spark 20 years ago when she was awarded an honorary degree by the American University of Paris, where he is a distinguished professor. 'She had a magical quality. Even though she could hardly see and was in considerable pain, she could completely command a room. She was so witty and clever, and the extent of her self-education was a revelation.' As was her charm. 'That was probably the hardest thing to communicate through her letters - unless I gave all the other side of the correspondence, which isn't really my job. But people loved her, absolutely loved her, which is why those publishers and agents put up with her being so extremely demanding.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Gunn is fully conscious of the fact that, as an editor of letters, he comes right at the end of a centuries-old tradition, one that vanished almost overnight with the arrival of email. 'There's a nostalgic element to representing a world we now don't know - where you had time to work out what you thought, sit down and write a letter. Certainly, Muriel put a lot of herself into those letters. But without letters, how are you ever going to reconstitute people's lives when they are dead?'
