James Blake: New Century Hall, Manchester – Live Review

James Blake
New Century Hall, Manchester
25th October 2026

James Blake moves effortlessly between electronic euphoria and heart-stopping intimacy, spinning Manchester’s New Century Hall into a space for both dancing and reflection. Thom Sidwell was there to catch the magic.

Blake has a unique ability to make a room full of people feel as though they’re sharing something deeply personal. His music draws you in quietly, then stays with you, lingering long after the final notes and ringing ears die down. He does performances you will be thinking about for days afterwards.

Over fifteen years, he has travelled from the sub-bass rumble of London’s underground dubstep scene to Mercury Prize-winning piano ballads, while collaborating with Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean, without ever sounding as though he’s chasing a trend. On a stormy Sunday in Manchester, he proved again that he’s less a genre artist than a one-man weather system. The perfect distraction from the windy tumult going on outside the doors of New Century.

He opens with Walk Out Music (appropriately) then slides slickly into Choose Me, all hollow space and delicate falsetto. Then comes a curveball: a cover of Untold’s Stop What You’re Doing, a nod to the UK bass scene that helped shape him and a moment that turns the room from reverent to restless. The shift spotlights Blake’s roots in the UK electronic underground, where rhythm and atmosphere matter as much as melody. For all the delicacy of his ballads, the instinct to make people move has never left him.

That tension between the sparse and the seismic runs through the entire night. This tension is a masterclass in collective restraint, flanked by his live band, Ben Assiter on a hybrid kit of organic and digital percussion, and Rob McAndrews treating his guitar like a shape-shifting syntheziser.

Operating entirely without the safety net of backing laptops, the trio operates like a jazz ensemble at a rave, looping, dubbing, and dismantling arrangements in real-time. When Dom Maker joins the fray, the sonic palette deepens even further; rhythms are stretched out on the fly and bass frequencies are weighted so precisely that the transitions between a fragile piano whisper and a full-blown sub-bass tremor feel completely instinctive.

Death of Love and I Had a Dream She Took My Hand are stripped, aching and gloriously fragile, the kind of songs that make a packed room feel like a whispered conversation between raincoats in bad weather. But just as you’ve settled into the melancholy, Make Something Up and Thrown Around arrive to shake you out of it. Thrown Around in particular is a joy, upbeat and propulsive, proof that Blake can do euphoria as convincingly as he does heartache. It’s one of the night’s first big moments of release, and the crowd takes it gladly.

The second half of the gig becomes a whirlwind of chaos and genre-hopping, like a drunken night that gradually melds into a rave before plunging into the emotional depths of a flowing ballad. Experimental detours keep the audience guessing, with Blake folding wildly different sounds and moods into one unpredictable set.

The covers bring another dimension to the evening. Blake approaches familiar songs with a sensitivity that reveals something new in them, finding unexpected depths in melodies that might otherwise feel well-worn.

Feist’s The Limit to Your Love is the template: wobbling bass, a yearning vocal and a song so completely his that the original almost feels like the cover. Later, Frank Ocean’s Godspeed is handled with a tenderness that borders on devotional, his voice floating over the arrangement as though it’s being carried. Neither feels like a gimmick. They feel like confessions read aloud from someone else’s diary.

You’re Too Precious keeps the energy simmering, and the night’s newest material slots in without a seam. The title track of his new album, Trying Times, is a highlight, an unforced, graceful piece of songwriting that sits comfortably alongside the older favourites. The album arrives with the confidence of an artist who has nothing left to prove, and its new material already sounds at home alongside the older favourites. Days Go By and Doesn’t Just Happen keep the momentum rolling, the latter a reminder of how comfortably he can nudge his sound towards hip hop, while Radio Silence lands with the weight of a song that’s lived in people’s headphones for years.

For the encore, Blake rolls out The Verve’s ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’. It’s a genuine surprise, and a brilliant one. A song that’s been bellowed in pubs and at weddings for nearly three decades is suddenly slowed, softened and made newly fragile. Stripped of its Britpop swagger, it becomes what it always was underneath: a quiet, devastating song about mortality. Blake’s voice carries it beautifully, and you can feel the whole hall lean in.

Retrograde follows, and it’s every bit as astonishing as you’d hope. Its slow, surging build is a masterclass in patience, and when the chorus finally lands, it feels like something giving way. Then, to finish, comes the feather-light Say What You Will, a gentle comedown that sends everyone out into the Manchester night soothed rather than shattered. It’s the right ending. After two hours of being pulled between ecstasy and ache, we’re allowed to go home at peace.

James Blake demonstrated just how many different ways one voice can make you feel. He moves between wonky bass, choral falsetto, quiet piano and full-blown club euphoria with an instinctive freedom, bringing every shift in mood together through the sheer force of his musical personality. Few artists today can be this vulnerable and this thrilling in the same breath. He remains a true musical chameleon, and a great one.

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James can be followed on his Website | Instagram | Facebook

Words by Thomas Sidwell, more work on his author profilehereand Instagramhere

Photos by Richard Ahern; he can be followed on Instagram