Gig Review: Laura Marling
As the last of the crowd was funnelling into the Camden Roundhouse, the skies began to open. With no support slot scheduled, and her customary no encore policy, a cosy, compact couple of hours with just Laura Marling and a guitar seemed the perfect environment to snatch some shelter from the ensuing storm.
Touring for the first time since 2017, Marling played to crowd of loyal fans delighting at the long setlist of old favourites. Starting with three songs from 2013’s ‘Once I Was An Eagle’, Marling showed no signs of being out of practice, her ability to fill the room with her voice and beguile an audience clearly well intact. The stage set consisted solely of a large white sheet, lit by lightly shifting colours, complimenting perfectly the understated, compelling performance. With little between-song small talk, Marling guides us through ‘Hope In The Air’ and ‘What He Wrote’, with a sing-speak delivery and storytelling aptitude reminiscent of the influential Leonard Cohen, before we come to the first of the highly acclaimed newer material from 2020’s ‘Song For Our Daughter’. ‘Hope We Meet Again’ comes across even more powerfully than on record, perhaps benefitting from the stripped back performance. ‘The End of the Affair’, begins with the lyric ‘Max came around one day / Very much nothing to say’; Max being a name chosen from nowhere - ‘a simple songwriting trick’, explains Marling. Upon release of the album, she received messages from the only two Max’s in her life asking her if there is something they needed to talk about – one of which was her therapist.
The peaceful, contemplative aura that Marling had conjured was momentarily burst as a concerning incident in the crowd meant that the show had to be stopped for a short period as medics attended to a member of the audience. As Marling returned to the stage, she thanked the Roundhouse team for their swift response and wished the person well. She explained that the current tour had been slightly plagued with strange incidents that meant the performance had to be paused, ‘I sneezed and my back gave out’ was met with laughs, as she restarted with ‘Sophia’, and the ambience of the night returned. Soon after came a new song that Marling vowed never to release as it was ‘too on the nose’, and not quite her style. In response to the ‘unbelievably misjudged’, your-next-job-could-be-in-cyber government campaign launched during lockdown, Marling sang ‘I was an artist before I became this / Can you believe I used to suck dick for free?’ to cries of ‘release it!’ after she’d finished.
As the set was coming to its conclusion, Marling brought out some more fan favourites. The standout song of the evening, ‘Goodbye England (Covered In Snow)’ was mesmerising, a beautiful rendition that silenced the audience, attention focussed solely on the singer: ‘And we will keep you / We will keep you little one / Safe from harm / Like an extra arm, you are a part of us’, the best of Laura Marling on display in this heart-warming and sincere rendition. The set ended with three songs from the latest album, Marling cracking out the electric guitar for the final singalong of ‘For You’, a perfect ending to an evening that showed as she enters this new stage of her career, post-pandemic, Marling is without a doubt at the top of her game.