After completing a dozen dates supporting Billy Bragg, who played his last gig of the tour at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, Patty Griffin moved around the corner to the Bush Hall to do a show of her own. The Bush is not well-known as a venue, but with its 300-odd capacity it ought to have a future as a showcase for intimate performances like this. Griffin kept telling us what a great time she had been having in England; maybe the hall's wedding-cake decor, dangling glass chandeliers and giant Christmas tree were having a hypnotic seasonal effect on her.
Solo, and armed only with a couple of acoustic guitars that kept going out of tune, the chestnut-haired Griffin turned in a performance that increased in resonance as the evening developed. It would be easy to pigeonhole her as a folk singer, but there is a slightly more complicated mix of influences in her work. She was born in Maine, in north-eastern America, but there is a strong French-Canadian strain in her family and she feels an affinity with the south and New Orleans. You can hear that in her voice, which has a ragged edge and primitive force when she chooses to let rip.
The simple configuration of voice and guitar can cut both ways: it can enhance the properties of the stronger songs, while reducing weaker ones to humdrum busker's fare. The latter fate befell one of her encores, a rather twee ode to her Irish grandmother called Mary. And a thing called My Dear Old Friend, a tremulous wail of horror at the ominous state of the world, was crying out for some cunning tricks of arrangement.
Griffin fared much better with Flaming Red, with its transition from a slow, bluesy minor key to an urgent up-tempo section. The percussive strum of Change hinted that she may have a rockier side fighting to get out, but she can also take the measure of a number as slow and spooky as Springsteen's Stolen Car, in which she caught the existential bleakness of the original.
The biggest surprise was her treatment of Tomorrow Night, a venerable pop stalwart once sung by Elvis Presley. Griffin was suddenly the torch singer par excellence, her voice hovering tremulously between blossoming romance and the fear of losing it. The version on her recent album, 1,000 Kisses, features some small-hours trumpet, but she didn't need it tonight.
