Once Jessie Ware has got a few songs out of the way and can trust herself to speak, she recounts how she used to be able to see the Brixton Academy’s dome from her friend’s window on the high street. She ticks off the band names, such as Basement Jaxx’s, she would see above the door. Now it’s her name up there, and tonight Ware is a little emotional – you can tell by her frequent swearing. She asks fans if there was any unauthorised merchandise outside the venue before the gig. There wasn’t.
“But that’s how you know you’ve made it!” she mock-complains in one breath. In the next, she’s telling us that her mum can get us special treatment in Nando’s across the road, such is her celebrity status nowadays.
Three years ago, when Ware played an album launch gig in her native Brixton, she was in a bijou nightclub up the road. Tonight she has sold out the much roomier Academy, with another sold-out night to follow, capping off a UK tour marking her second album, last October’s Tough Love. It’s a big night for her, she confesses more than once.
This grungy old theatre has been semi-transformed into a place of minimalism and sophistication. At the back of the stage hangs a white banner with Ware’s name printed on it in a fuss-free font; three electronic workstations and a drumkit divide the space. The lighting is all white, the four-piece band and Ware are all in black, and we are pitched somewhere between the days of monochrome film and some loft space in the 80s, in which Ware’s smooth but perfectly formed songs about love can float by.
At least that’s the theory. There proves to be a little debris in the way. Ware’s triumphal set begins awkwardly, with a reworked version of Running, from her debut album, 2012’s Devotion. Her band have imposed themselves on the song’s previously glacial electronic funk, busying the drums, going to town on a guitar solo that was previously chained to a post. As well as Ware’s suede icicle of a voice, an instrument that never works harder than it needs to, her appeal has lain in the music’s self-containment, its confidence in not having to show off, its refusal to turn knowing 80s soul references into easy cheese. Has there been a trade-off to get to the bigger stages, you wonder, where exaggerated gestures are required? Will Ware stop her magnificent under-emoting, and start executing vocal runs? It’s a concern because it feels as though Ware – who, for all her class, goes top 10 in the UK, but not higher – might be on the cusp of something even more shiver-inducing than two sold-out Brixton Academies.
She has been nominated for a best female Brit award. In the run-up to Christmas her gospel-tinged tune, Say You Love Me, was used in a Victoria’s Secret perfume ad in the US. The soundtrack to the forthcoming Fifty Shades of Grey film will be released next week, and Ware’s song Meet Me in the Middle, thus far unreleased, will reintroduce her music to the vast American market. 50 Shades might change things, as might her coast-to-coast tour and March TV appearances Stateside.
But that is weeks away. Tonight Ware’s concern remains playing her songs to the borough that made them, scented with a little 21st-century sub-bass wubbing (Cruel), and elsewhere, tinged with multiple dance genres (110% still sounds like a tilt at Nordic pop). People get their phones out for Tough Love, a none-more-80s torch song sung in Ware’s exquisite falsetto.
Fortunately, the band soon calm down and let the synthetic digitals speak for themselves. Crisis averted: Ware retains her sangfroid. “I’m crying out of one eye!” she exclaims at one point, and that remains a key to her music: expressing romantic hurt and yearning but with artful detachment.
You can count Ware’s vocal gymnastics on the fingers of one hand and – although she gets cheers each time – she keeps their power keen through under-use. Keep on Lying is one such occasion, where she sings “If this isn’t love, then I don’t wanna know” like a diva, then goes back to coolly tracking the melody. A dozen canned Wares create an angel horde of harmonies around her. If she wanted to up the ante, she might consider hiring some flesh and blood singers and canning the guitarist instead.
After a collective sing-song of Wildest Moments, Ware’s first-album almost-hit, and Say You Love Me, her American passport, she jogs off the stage, stabbing the air with her fingers in delight. Outside, at the end, there is plenty of unauthorised merchandise for sale.
