The queue snakes right the way down Chalk Farm Road, looping entirely around the local Morrison’s. Over a thousand JPEGMAFIA fans are waiting in line; several are wearing his trademark black and white bandana, some sport his fingerless skating gloves. One particularly memorable fan is shirtless, with black-and-white face paint à la WWE wrestler Sting.
Barrington Hendricks, aka JPEGMAFIA, inspires this level of devotion amongst his (mostly male, mostly teenaged) fans, simply because no one else really sounds like he does. Across five studio albums and a host of singles, side projects and ephemera, he’s forged a niche within modern rap music as a truly unique voice. He’s as much a producer as he is a rapper, and the combined effect of both is that of having the entire internet beamed directly into your brain: his sound is schizophrenic, veering between dreampop and grindcore, conventional trap and tribal drumming.
So, what to expect from his first London headline show in three years? His latest LP I Lay Down My Life For You is well-represented here, as is his brilliant 2023 Danny Brown collaboration Scaring The Hoes. In fact, the entire set felt far more definitive than previous tours, ranging from his 2013 ‘Call Me Maybe’ cover (a truly bizarre interlude), right through to tracks from the deluxe version of his latest album released on the day before the show.
But the focus, far more than the material here, is on Hendricks’ performance. Almost half an hour late, he takes to the stage in a floor-length Blade-esque leather jacket, Stetson hat and balaclava, to a rapturous response from a crowd chanting “Peggy!” He thanks them, but tells the Roundhouse that he doesn’t have much to say, and launches into an opening salvo of hits: ‘Jesus Forgive Me, I Am A Thot’, ‘Lean Beef Patty’ and ‘Hazard Duty Pay’. The sub-bass rattles through the main hall as Hendricks – alone apart from a DJ/hypeman who is static throughout – whips the crowd into a frenzy.
He moves like a man possessed, darting from one side of the stage to another, hands outstretched to the crowd, then the sky, then the ground. He’s almost never still, and his delivery is the same – veering between a whisper and a shriek, aided by unexpected blasts of autotune and dub echo. So much of his appeal is his bravado, with bars that are simultaneously hilarious and bizarre. At one point he dedicates a track to everyone in the crowd who is bald, and at another he teases a Denzel Curry appearance, before confirming that Denzel isn’t there and getting the crowd to chant “fuck you Peggy!”.
But all of this bombast obscures two central truths of the set – that at the heart of it, JPEGMAFIA’s music is both strangely beautiful and deeply vulnerable. On both counts, one need look no further than ‘either on or off the drugs’, one of the high points of the set. Hendricks’ backing track – despite being obscured by gonzo production choices and blown-out mixing – is taken from a gorgeous soul ballad (that, in a hilarious JPEGMAFIA twist, is sampled from an AI-generated track). But kicker is his ability to lay out his mental health and vulnerability, in front of a sea of baying fans chanting along. “I’m Michael Jackson dancing in the mirror / The only one who can’t see me is me” he raps, resting his mic on the DJ booth as if it were a pulpit, looking almost teary.
To end the set, he thanks the crowd for supporting him for an entire decade; it’s difficult to think of anyone else in that time who has matched his relentless drive to become yet more experimental. JPEGMAFIA is a singular voice, almost a genre unto himself, and his live set is similarly singular – you feel that you’ve spent a few hours in his insular, fascinating world. You really do hope, to borrow his Michael Jackson line, that he can see how good what he’s doing is too.
