RAYE review, Co-Op Live Manchester – Just give her the Bond theme now

Ambitious, thrilling show asserts the UK pop artist as one of the greats, as she traces her lineage through jazz, blues, dance and R&B

That old razzle-dazzle: RAYE performs during her 2026 tour (Redferns)

“No one’s got to rush off anywhere do they?” RAYE checks with her audience, who respond with a hearty roar. The pop artist born Rachel Keen is hosting the first night of her biggest UK tour to date, at the Co-Op Live in Manchester. As always, there’s an air of spontaneity to proceedings – RAYE, our Grammy and Brit Award-winning star, loves an ad-lib, an anecdote, an extra vocal run. Yet the concert itself is a triumph for one of the most extraordinary musicians the UK has produced in years, one in which raw talent meets technical brilliance, and prowess and professionalism collide with high-spirited gaiety.

Since releasing her 2023 debut album, the Mercury Prize-shortlisted My 21st Century Blues, RAYE has steadily leant further into her jazz and blues influences. Her fantastic live band is here, with a dedicated brass section who ramp up the drama. Indeed, “I’m in my dramatic era,” she declares, and you wonder why the James Bond producers bother looking anywhere else, when the perfect 007 artist is right in front of us.

She kicks off proceedings with a tremendous salvo of “Where is My Husband?” – a tongue-in-cheek stamp of petulance over the absence of a “big and shiny diamond” on her ring finger – and the “The Thrill is Gone”. I love her feigned looks of surprise at the screams of approval when she hits a particularly huge note, the “who, me?” eyes, the faux shyness as she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.

Tonight feels like a lesson in musical genealogy, as RAYE traces her lineage through greats such as Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald to Noughties R&B (a cover of Ja Rule and Ashanti’s “Always on Time” mingles with Latin licks of acoustic guitar on “Flip a Switch”), and back to a swoon-worthy rendition of Kaye Ballard’s “Fly Me to the Moon”. Her enthusiasm – some might say nerdiness – for the triumphant crash of symbols to signal a song’s climax, or a key shift (“give me a D Minor”) is infectious. And there’s something truly magical about witnessing 23,000 or so fans, mostly twenty and thirty-somethings, go nuts over a trumpet riff.

The airing of songs from her forthcoming second album, This Music May Contain Hope – scheduled for release in March – lets us know we’re in for a treat. “South London Lower Boy” is a modern-day parable for single women, complete with Hammer Horror font on the big screen: “Beware!” Another, “Winter Woman”, demonstrates how far RAYE has come as a storyteller, narrating romantic tragedy from the third person as her voice turns crystalline. Her violinist incorporates the icy filigrees of “Winter” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons into an impeccable solo. Another new song, “Nightingale Lane”, turns heartbreak into songwriting alchemy, while her rumbling 2024 opus “Genesis” remains one of the most ambitious pop works of the decade. She takes a seat at the piano for “Ice Cream Man”, a sexual assault survivor’s anthem that should be taught in as a feminist text in schools: “I’m a very f***ing brave strong woman/ And I’ll be damned if I let a man ruin/ How I walk, how I talk, how I do it.”

She doesn’t omit the dance music that defined the earliest stage of her career. But where her former record label tried to keep her as another faceless vocal on endless club tunes, she takes those songs and makes them bigger, better. The “RAVE” portion of the evening is a thrilling race through the pulsating demands of “Prada”, the dismissive “You Don’t Know Me” and hauntingly evocative “Black Mascara”. Her sisters AMMA (Laura Keen) and Absolutely (Abbey Keen), her opening acts, join her for the unreleased “Joy”, showing off what a talented family they are. RAYE is a phenomenon, destined to be known forever as one of the greats.