On the day they are nominated for the Mercury prize, Jungle demonstrate at this iTunes festival show that they would be worthy winners. Their songs are all fluid, rolling, lubricious grooves, fuelled by blaxploitation wah-wah guitars, fervent soul and wailing sirens, like a preposterously tight 70s funk session band. Essentially a homage to a pop-soul golden age gone by, their tribute is delivered with lashings of tender loving care.
As the man who helped to define the sound of modern R&B and hip-hop, Pharrell Williams operates at the most rarefied of pop altitudes. Even so, it remains a moot point whether this A-list collaborator and peerless studio genius truly cuts it as a solo artist.
There is an audible gasp from tonight’s overawed audience of fashionistas and competition winners when the man of the moment appears, clad in artfully ripped jeans, Sex Pistols T-shirt and blue fedora. He knows how to start a show, too, firing straight into the delirious robot funk of a Daft Punk collaboration, Lose Yourself to Dance.
Yet surrounded by furiously gyrating dancers, the reserved, distant Williams is as much an absence as a presence at the heart of the noise. His falsetto is good but not great and the songs from his recent second album, GIRL, such as Come Get It Bae, originally a duet with Miley Cyrus, are slight and insubstantial slivers of pop-funk.
Williams is patently a creative catalyst, a facilitator, rather than a charismatic frontman. His ubiquity as a co-writer and producer in the early 2000s means a good chunk of tonight’s set sounds like a greatest hits of R&B and hip-hop from that era, as the low-key Williams glides unobtrusively through Nelly’s Hot in Herre, Snoop Dogg’s Drop It Like It’s Hot and Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl.
His between-songs banter is mostly positivist guff, and he is an extraordinarily corporate figure. His repetitive shout-outs to gig sponsor iTunes cause a few audience grumbles, which temporarily jolt Williams from his blank impassivity: “We’re celebrating Apple, whether you like it or not!” he admonishes them, oddly.
Yet he is able to close with the triple whammy of the UK’s three bestselling singles of the past 18 months: the hapless Robin Thicke’s lyrically disquieting but sonically majestic Blurred Lines, the endorphin frenzy that is Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, and the 21st-century Motown of the wondrous Happy. Pharrell Williams is a man who makes the stars shine. It’s just not entirely clear that he is one himself.
• At O2 Arena, London, October 9-10. Tickets: 0844 856 0202.
