[Source: BBC]

If you watched Loyle Carner headlining Glastonbury’s West Holts stage on Saturday you saw something special.

Competing with Guns N’ Roses and Lana Del Rey, the London rapper, 28, pulled in an adoring crowd for a soul-bearing and personally purifying performance.

“I’m playing this off like it isn’t the craziest night of my life,” he said.

“Thanks for being here with me, you could have been anywhere.”

The show was largely constructed around his third album, Hugo, which takes a broad look at his relationship with his biological father, his identity as a mixed-race young man growing up in south London, and the scourge of knife crime that’s afflicted the capital.

It was inspired by the birth of his own son, now three – who, he proudly noted, was in the crowd – and how that forced him to re-examine his own relationship with his father.

Watch Loyle Carner’s full set on BBC iPlayer

The musician was born Benjamin Gerard Coyle-Larner to a white, British mother and a black, Guyanese father who was “present at times and not present at other times” during his childhood.

Instead, he and his brother were raised in Croydon by his mum and step-father, Nik, entering music at a young age with the Mercury-nominated Yesterday’s Gone in 2017.

When his girlfriend became pregnant in 2019, Carner called his dad to break the news and was shocked when he hung up the phone.

A couple of weeks later, however, he called back and offered to teach his son to drive. Their relationship was repaired, or rather rebuilt, over the course of those lessons, as Carner learned about his dad’s childhood in the care system, with no role model to show him how to be a father.

“To cut a long story short, we founded our relationship in that car. It became my safe space for conversation and shouting and apologising and crying,” he tells the BBC.

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