There’s something about a final tour date that raises the stakes for everyone in the room. By the time Tom A Smith took to the stage at the sold-out Bodega in Nottingham on Friday night, the energy already had that particular quality — part celebration, part reluctance to let it end. He fed off it brilliantly.
Before all that, Hunny Buzz set the tone with blue-lit female vocals and the kind of warm, self-aware charm that wins a room over quickly. Their merch plug — a full QVC-style segment with the drummer coming to the mic to show off each item in turn — was genuinely funny and got a huge response. They closed on Car Collision under purple lights, sending the birthday boy in the crowd home with the setlist. A support act that clearly belongs on this kind of bill.
Then Tom. The Road to Nowhere intro gave way to a set built as much on connection as on songs. He’s the kind of performer who makes the whole room feel like they’re in on something — moving up close to fans, cracking jokes about a mic stand that snapped mid-tour and its suspiciously sensual replacement, pausing mid-set to acknowledge the crowd’s instinct to keep wooing long after Our Song had finished. That stuff can feel forced in the wrong hands. Here it felt completely natural.
The setlist moved through The Only One’s gentle purple-lit calm, Remember Me with fans singing back the intro before he’d even reached the mic, and Little Bits — blue lights flashing, arms up, the room bouncing. Then came the night’s most unexpected and genuinely special moment. Tom had mentioned earlier in the set that his first ever gig was played in a Happy Mondays t-shirt, so when Rowetta — the British singer who worked with Happy Mondays from 1990 and whose 1989 track Reach Out has been sampled by the Black Eyed Peas and Steve Angello among others — walked out having flown in from Ibiza for the occasion, it felt less like a cameo and more like a full circle moment. The room shifted gear entirely for Toronto, the crowd piling into Tommy’s Dancing Club with everything they had left, and the Bodega briefly became somewhere else entirely.
Fashion closed the main run in the most emphatic way possible — dirty bass shuddering through the floor, Tom stripped to his tank top, running, thrashing, pouring everything he had left into it. The kind of closing moment that makes the encore feel almost unnecessary, until The Band arrived under purple lights with an unexpected bass shutter and that aggressive, emotional energy that left the room spent and satisfied in equal measure.
“The last twelve months have been the greatest of our lives,” he told the crowd before the end. “We announced this tour not knowing what to expect — it had been two years — and we sold out. This tour has been the greatest thing we ever did.”
Nottingham, he said, was the first to sell out. They knew it, and they acted like it all night.
A new EP lands next week. On this evidence, the rooms are only going to get bigger.
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