Lianne La Havas’s first London gig in two years opens with a rousing shimmer, hinting at both jazz and class. Her band whip up an oscillation, while some “ahs” from La Havas and her backing singer gather in volume until the startling scarlet maxi-culottes La Havas is wearing begin to quiver at the hems.
Suddenly, with pin-sharp timing, the shimmer becomes Unstoppable – a scientifically minded love song La Havas recently debuted on Later… With Jools Holland, one of the original springboards for her career. “I was just a satellite, spinning around,” she sings. “It’s just gravitational, we are unstoppable.” (The chipmunk-y Jungle remix doing the rounds of the internet isn’t a patch on La Havas in the flesh.)
Four years ago, this former Paloma Faith backing singer was an emerging songwriter with a number of appealing inconsistencies. Despite packing the sort of lung power associated with soul and R&B, her debut album, Is Your Love Big Enough?, was full of winsome tunes that deftly skirted genres. La Havas played a blue electric guitar. She was half-Greek (her dad taught her to play), half-Jamaican (her grandparents raised her), and she didn’t care what you thought of her relationship with an older man. Age, the song most specifically about that topic, remains an enduringly breezy encore tonight.
Now, of course, the 25-year-old La Havas is probably most famous as the woman whose east London living room last year served as the location for a press conference by Prince. The two connected when Prince admired La Havas’s music and invited her to Paisley Park for a jam.
La Havas sang on Prince’s Art Official Age comeback album and performed with him on Saturday Night Live, an undeniable fillip to her profile as a versatile artist. Hearing her old tunes afresh tonight, you still boggle at how much clear blue water there is, stylistically, between her songs. Au Cinéma retains its 60s French insouciance. Built on a sulky guitar riff and rightly saved for the encore, the magnificent Forget is one of the few times the formal, smiley and well-spoken La Havas bares her canines.
In a few weeks, her status might have changed once again, from purple protégée to the UK’s latest transatlantic export. La Havas’s second album, Blood (“nothing to do with anything gruesome, but family and heritage and bloodlines”), is due out at the end of July, and it should play well. Producers such as Paul Epworth (Adele, Florence and the Machine) are on board, adding a winner’s mindset; one of Disclosure has an unlikely writing credit, on a ballad called Wonderful. La Havas doesn’t play it tonight, but six new songs provide an indicative sample.
The backstory of Blood finds La Havas in Jamaica for the first time, inhabiting a culture that she had only known secondhand. Green & Gold describes her staring at her nose in the mirror as a child, contemplating her identity (and, perhaps even more endearingly, whether “the mirror world goes on for ever”).
Many Caribbean conversions fall prey to a clutch of crude stereotypes: a fug of ganja here, a reggae pastiche there. But Green & Gold is all finger-clicks and neo-soul, and nods to her Greek ancestry in the “ancient stones” of the chorus. And yet while she is far from becoming “Lion” La Havas, there is a reggae-derived righteousness on Grow, the album’s sucker punch. La Havas straps on an acoustic guitar and croons about resisting evil, before a climactic chorus finds her emoting powerfully near the ceiling of her range.
The rest isn’t quite so compelling, merely functional. Tokyo is a classic second album cut in which an artist finds herself touring far from home, questioning their relationships in the neon of an unfamiliar megalopolis. There’s no topspin here, just mid-paced soul-by-numbers.
Midnight is more of the same – upbeat neo-soul with brassy accents – but at least La Havas cuts loose finally unleashing thelung power she keeps in reserve. You can discern a certain repositioning going on here, the loss of quirk and the uptick in air miles, the rheumy industry eye trained on the American market.
