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RZA peers quizzically into the O2 audience through a pair of impressively bejewelled sunglasses. “How many people in this crowd were born in the 70s?” he enquires, after an attempt to get the audience bouncing on the spot has met with a decidedly tepid response. The ensuing roar suggests the majority of attenders at what’s being billed as the Wu-Tang Clan’s farewell tour are old enough to remember the Staten Island rap crew’s gamechanging arrival on the early-90s hip-hop scene first-hand. He nods understandingly. “Your legs, right?” he offers, kneading the back of his thighs, perhaps no stranger to the occasional twinge himself. Clearly, the challenges in reconvening the Wu-Tang Clan for one final jaunt around the world involve not merely assembling the multifarious members after years of internal strife, but accounting for the stiff joints of the hip-hop dads such a gig is likely to attract.
Nevertheless, the tour arrives in the UK trailing ecstatic reviews from its 2025 American leg. Its European iteration is a little scaled down by necessity, its setlist pared back slightly, its impressive raft of guest stars – everyone from Slick Rick to Lauryn Hill turned up in the US – reduced to just one: Mobb Deep’s Havoc. Still, the version of Shook Ones, Part II he delivers in the company of Raekwon and Ghostface Killah is ferocious and besides, it’s not as if Wu-Tang Clan really need additional firepower.
As the members gradually arrive onstage for a brace of tracks from their epochal debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), you’re struck by how little their verbal firepower has been diminished by the passing years. If a live backing band can’t hope to recreate the unsettling, grimy atmosphere conjured by RZA’s crackling samples on Protect Ya Neck or Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F’ Wit, the vocals still carry a sense of barely controlled and feral energy: Young Dirty Bastard makes a fair fist of filling in for his late father (who was the most feral of the lot), managing to capture some of ODB’s unhinged intensity without sounding like he’s doing an impersonation.
The gig then splits into individual showcases. The crowd seem slightly reserved during Raekwon and Ghostface Killah’s slot, which feels baffling – 1995’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx is widely held not just to be among the best Wu-Tang solo albums, but among the greatest hip-hop albums full stop – but go obligingly nuts for Method Man, who’s so taken with their response he not only flashes his abs, but attempts a British accent.
The transitions between the solo spots are smoothly done, but the gig is still subject to what you might politely call some unexpected set list choices. The poppy 2000 single Gravel Pit – a far bigger hit in the UK than back home in the US – gets a huge reaction, but it’s truncated after one verse. On the other hand, there’s a version of Barbra Streisand’s The Way We Were – the actual song, not the 36 Chambers highlight Can It Be All So Simple? that deployed a sample of it – delivered straight, by a backing vocalist, in tribute to band associate Oliver “Power” Grant, who died last month. You can understand why, but, like the adverts that punctuate the gig – for a forthcoming movie directed by RZA called One Spoon of Chocolate, a Wu Tang Clan video game and a documentary about the making of Only Built 4 Cuban Linx – it gives the show a slightly disjointed quality.
But it wouldn’t be the Wu-Tang Clan if it wasn’t at least a bit messy and puzzling. As the audience members struggling to jump at RZA’s command would doubtless attest, it’s as slick as a tightly choreographed pop concert compared to the beldam of an early Wu-Tang gig: one mid-90s London appearance by Method Man memorably devolved into chaos after he inexplicably chose to remove his trainers and throw them into the audience, then lost his temper when the audience declined to return them. Stuff like that used to happen all the time, and it doesn’t tonight. Instead they’re reunited for a version of CREAM – a track that still sounds like the musical equivalent of a brawl 30-odd years on – and the audience limp home happy.
