Krept and Konan with Yungen, K-Trap and Kiico
o2 Academy Bristol
Bristol, UK
January 26th 2020
Krept and Konan brought their ‘Revenge is Sweet’ tour to the o2 Academy in Bristol (UK) on January 26th 2020. Their real names being Casyo ‘Krept’ Johnson and Karl ‘Konan’ Wilson are a British hip-hop/grime duo from London, United Kingdom. They signed a record deal with Virgin EMI Records in 2013 and had their first major release a few months later with the mixtape ‘Young Kingz’. Since then they have released numerous other mixtapes and two studio albums. Their first studio album ‘The Long Way Home’ was released in July 2015 and their second studio album ‘Revenge is Sweet’ was released in November 2019. This is the tour which they brought to Bristol. Krept and Konan have collaborated with many well-known names in the music industry, some of these include: Stormzy, Ed Sheeran, Skepta, Giggs, JME, Wiley, YG…the list goes on.
The Revenge is Sweet tour treated the fans to three support acts before the headliners Krept and Konan took to the stage. The first support was ‘Kiico’ who is now signed to Play Dirty (Krept and Konan’s) record label. Kiico got signed to Play Dirty after winning ‘The Rap Game UK’ which was aired on the BBC Three TV channel, if you haven’t already watched this…I recommend you do! I thought it was great. The second support was ‘K-Trap’ who is a London based trap/drill artist and the third was ‘Yungen’ who is a rapper, singer and songwriter, also from London. Yungen had the crowd going wild to songs such as ‘Bad’ which is Steel Banglez song but Yungen featured on it and the fans were singing the chorus acapella to one of his most successful songs ‘Bestie’, it was fantastic.
Just like the Revenge is Sweet album cover, the stage was set up as a sweet shop counter. This is where Krept and Konan’s DJ was positioned behind. The sweets positioned on the counter were not all recognisable sweet brand names like you’d assume and instead had labels which presented words such as: Karma, Revenge, Play Dirty, F**k Boy, Cadet and Salam. I thought this was a great concept to incorporate hidden messages. These words mean something/relate to the duo in some shape of form. Revenge and Karma are quite self-explanatory words, however some of the other words you’d only know what they mean if you’re familiar with Krept and Konan or urban slang. I mentioned earlier about what Play Dirty is, but here are the meanings behind Cadet and Salam. If you don’t know already, Krept’s younger cousin Cadet, who was also a British rapper/grime artist, was tragically killed in a car crash whilst on his way to a gig in February 2019. Salam means ‘Peace be upon you’ in Arabic. If you don’t know what ‘F**k Boy’ means, I recommend you search the definition up in an urban dictionary.
The show kicked off and first to come out on stage was Krept who was silhouetted upon a white lit up screen and shortly after Konan appeared on the right side of the stage, also in front of a white lit up screen. Throughout the night they played songs such as: iSpy, Don’t Waste My Time and Freak Of The Week. Konan stage dived into the crowd during the iSpy performance, as you can imagine the crowd were going mental!! The venue was completely packed, I’m assuming it was a SOLD OUT show. After I left the pit area where I was getting shots of the duo, I couldn’t barely see them performing on the stage at all.
If you haven’t ever listened to Grime music or aren’t that familiar with it as a genre, you should definitely check out Krept and Konan as well as the supporting acts from this show. Some of my personal favourites are: ‘Wo Wo Wo’, ‘iSpy’, ‘Don’t Waste My Time’, ‘Freak of the Week’ and ‘G Love’ by Krept and Konan and ‘Bestie’, ‘Mind On It’, ‘Comfortable’ by Yungen.
I love this article so much!! Very informative and humorous at the same time. These photos are absolutely incredible too, they really capture the euphoria of live music perfectly.