Damien Rice at the O2 Apollo Manchester: 'We're ready to be sad again'

Damien Rice's first two albums, released in 2002 and 2006 respectively, were of a world in which people wanted to feel; his third, in 2014, years after the financial crash, was of a world in which they didn’t. In which the chart-topping music, at least in the UK, was centred mostly around rendering oneself insensate through drink, with lyrics that featured every possible combination of the words 'tonight', 'young' and 'forever'.

But time is a circle, and we’re ready to be sad again.

Anybody that has ever been in love has a friend in Damien Rice. His songs are wistful elegies to those that have gone from our lives, and the memories – sometimes soothing, sometimes haunting – left in their wake. Most will be aware of his early work. The likes of Cannonball, Blower’s Daughter and 9 Crimes were part of the backdrop of the early-to-mid noughties. Songs that made being sad feel good.

If there’s a single word to describe Damien Rice, it’s intimate. As much his music – with the likes of Amie feeling like an at-the-beach serenade – as his performances. Last night’s performance, at the O2 Apollo in Manchester, was no exception. Damien Rice is as consistent as his music. Which, almost always, involves a disconsolate piano or guitar bleeding into his characteristic, dream-inducing voice, giving the listener the sensation of being in, on top of or under water.

Rice is famous for eschewing publicity. Like many that have come before, not least Kurt Cobain and Eliot Smith, he's been known to view the music industry as something of a necessary evil. And sometimes, given his operate-outside-the-system antics, as just an evil. But times have changed. The world that first met Damien Rice in 2002 is very different from the world today. The