JOANNA NEWSOM-Colleen (Live at the Royal Albert Hall)
In a terrific weekend for live music in the UK capital, Joanna Newsom and PJ Harvey, two of the Academy’s favourite female artists, played respectively two triumphant gigs, which have placed them both ahead as favourites for the Rober, heating up the race for this year’s Best live act gong.
There were high expectations surrounding the queen of new folk at the closing concert of her international tour and Joanna Newson didin’t disappoint, bringing the audience at the Royal Albert Hall to standing ovations. After a two hour set comprising the whole of her second album, the Rober winning classic “Ys”, accomodating Van Dyke Park’s lush orchestral arrangements to fit the requirements of her three-piece band, plus highlights of her first, “Peach, Plum, Tree” among them.
She left room for the traditional, covering a Scottish popular folk song, helped at the vocals by support band The Moore Brothers, and the brand new, introducing a complete new song.
Amazed by the place and expresing her gratitude for British folk legend Roy Harper’s support ,Joanna Newson caught the whole of the Albert Hall in her pocket.
PJ HARVEY-Nina In Ecstasy (Live at the Royal Festival Hall)
The following day, Dorset’s favourite songwriter presented her eight studio album, “White Chalk”, in one woman band mode to rapturous effect.
Polly Harvey, dressed with the granny-like outfit she wears on the cover, went through the majority of the sepia-toned, evocative new songs, where she’s replaced her usual guitars for a piano on its composition.
She started her show with two classics from Rober award winning album “To Bring you my love”, the title track and “Bring His Love To Me”, armed solely with an electric guitar and some distortion pedals.
In a stage divided in four areas (piano, where she played the new songs; front microphone for the electric ones; a keyboard and some analog beat boxes that gave her some problems for the most experimental material, mostly taken from her “is This desire?” days, and a chair where she played harp (a lovely reworking of “Down by the water”) and acoustic guitar.
New tracks followed old highlights like “Rid of me”, “Water”, “Pistol” or “Mansize” with haunting intensity. Alltogether, the gig brought us the many sides of a superlative artist currently back on top form.
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