Marlon Williams music review: An urgent incantation
The Aotearoa/New Zealand singer-songwriter casts a hush over his crowd with cosmic songs and expansive emotions
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Òran Mór’s Gaelic name translates from Gaelic as ‘big song’ or ‘melody of life’. At the Glasgow venue Marlon Williams arrives with a very big song indeed: a set sung almost entirely in Māori, the language of Aotearoa. For a Scottish crowd with their own history of native song and story, the symmetry is visceral. The set begins with material from his 2025 album Te Whare Tīwekaweka (‘The Messy House’). Standing onstage in a schoolboy-ish suit and framed by the Yarra Benders, Williams’ voice finds a different texture in te reo Māori: more urgent, almost incantatory.
His words are expansive, filling the hall with ease and stilling the crowd. The excited Kiwi accents hush, and my companion quickly points out that no one is holding up a phone. In a sold-out venue in 2026, this collective presence feels quite astonishing. Big moments include the lonely ballad of ‘Aua Atu Rā’ and a cover of ‘Rongomai’, a gentle, cosmic song about Halley’s Comet (of course). Later, tender love song ‘Kuru Pounamu’ which translates to ‘my little greenstone earring’ or, as Williams jokes, a ‘wee bobby dazzler’, earns delighted laughter. Old favourites such as ‘Dark Child and ‘My Boy’ are greeted with reverent recognition, while the glittery ‘Don’t Go Back’ gets the crowd bopping.
Support act The Maes (whose celestial harmonies and deadpan storytelling took us on a journey from clinical depression to folk romance and on to the Highland Clearances) join the ensemble for an encore: a joyous rendition of ‘September Fields’. Marlon Williams and his friends brought the songs of Aotearoa to Glasgow, but they also proved that the melody of life requires little translation.
Marlon Williams plays Thekla, Bristol, Thursday 16 April; reviewed at Òran Mór, Glasgow; picture: Rabie Al (rabiephotography.com; @rabiefoto).