Paloma Faith -gig review 24/03/2010

Paloma has been unwell recently and has hardly any voice, I was meant to be interviewing her earlier but she had to cancel all press to try and preserve the little voice that she has left in order to not have to cancel shows. Despite not having a sore throat this evening, she ploughs on with the show. And what a fine job she did of it too! It was a show littered with her album tracks, jazz covers, a radio 1 live lounge cover, costume changes and jazzy break downs.

La shark are on first, I pre- warn my mother, who attended the gig with me, that she may not like them because they’re quite strange but after a couple of songs she turns to me and says “these are good, these are.” This seems to be the general feeling around me, at first the audience were taken aback by the bizarre mash up of ideas, genres and images that La Shark convey but by half way through the set they are drawn in and start to like them. It seems that La Shark have obvious punk/ska roots but they appear to be influenced by a lot of things, some might describe them as mad heads who’ve somehow managed to obtain musical instruments but others would consider their experimental approach artistic and genius, I’d go with the latter.







After lots of excessive guitar tuning and the revelation of a large, theatre set type mirror (a hint to the opener of the set, Smoke and Mirrors), Paloma’s band take to the stage, followed dramatically of course, by the lady, herself. Paloma works the stage dressed in a multi-coloured cat suit and a head full of fruit, if I hadn’t have known that she wasn’t feeling 100% I would never have guessed it from this entrance! Paloma evidently found it hard to talk at times, which wasn’t helped by the absolute idiots that were shouting obscene things at her from the balcony in between songs but her singing voice remained fairly strong throughout the set. Her mellow jazz covers such as Nina Simone’s ‘Don’t Explain’, her Billie Holiday cover and her slant on The Beatles’ ‘You never give me your money’ were sounding beautiful and Paloma’s dancing was still energetic. A particular highlight of her set for me was the ‘remix’ version of her third single ‘Do you want the Truth or something beautiful?’ which was highly refreshing and the band seemed to enjoy playing it a lot. Speaking of her band, I must say how talented they all are! Dom’s piano skills are excellent, this something which I noticed especially, with being a pianist myself, the guitarists were great and I see a bright future ahead for all of her gifted backing singers, particularly ‘Baby Sol’, whom I felt had a particular stage presence/ unique charismatic appeal to her. After a stunning set, the encore songs were her cover of Etta James’ ‘At last’ and the single that really broke her into the world of main stream music ‘New York’. As always after a good gig, there is an air of love and adoration in the room, this reassures me that although there may be a lot of dislike for Paloma, there is a lot of love for her too. I know a lot of people that don’t like her but in the wise words of Mama Wilkinson, “what is there not to like about Paloma? She’s lovely!”





Katie x