“I’ve got a couple of anxieties,” confesses Laura Mvula a few songs into an assured set. The twice-Mercury-nominated, Mobo-winning star has just shimmered on Overcome, a highlight of her second album, The Dreaming Room, released earlier this year. She has soared on Let Me Fall, a jubilant, jazzy outing. Projecting a regal presence – you could mint a coin off her profile – and slinging a giant white keytar around unironically, this classically trained composer does not have the air of a nervous wreck.
Fans know otherwise though. The audience inhales, bracing itself. Throughout 2016, Mvula has given a series of candid interviews revealing the debilitating panic attacks that have long punctuated her private life, like a detuned string section that won’t stop scything away, no matter how many dirty looks you throw them.
The anxiety contributed to her divorce from her husband, whose surname she still bears. Her brother (cello) and sister (guitar) are in her five-piece band – for moral support as well as their musical gifts. There is a pregnant pause. Mvula looks down at her audience, mostly seated, from the Albert Hall’s high stage. “Can you see up my dress?” she asks with a deadpan Brummie lilt.
Ethereal yet down to earth – “My Nan pushed 10 humans out of her vagina!” she boggles at one point – Mvula is one of those artists who can inhabit overlapping spheres. Her sometimes over-polite music can sit quite comfortably on a series of daytime TV sofas, combining classic soul signifiers with conservatoire erudition. The metaphors in her lyrics are perfectly accessible: moon, stars, mountains, flying, falling, overcoming. If anything, they can be a little too pat. Diamonds, from her first album, Sing to the Moon, is a case in point tonight. There really should be a voluntary, pop-wide moratorium on that devalued mineral.
Mainstream acceptance is firmly in the bag, anyway. Mvula’s latest single, a cover of Ready or Not, is the soundtrack to this year’s House of Fraser Christmas ad. Written by the Delfonics, most people know the song thanks to the Fugees’ version. Mvula’s take is actually quite arresting: she sings the opening couplets with a Caribbean inflection that is almost stentorian.
Confirming her status, she performed Ready or Not on Strictly Come Dancing last month. Her God-fearing Nan didn’t watch it, confides Mvula, preferring her granddaughter’s turn on Songs of Praise. She has also sung for the Queen.
Does Mvula perform Ready or Not tonight? Nope. The focus is on the hard-won songs from The Dreaming Room, and a closing Nina Simone cover, Be My Husband. Some second albums are more difficult than others – Mvula’s was one of them. “I thought I was going to be Lauryn Hill,” she says. She mimes dropping an album, then sauntering off. “Sony were like, ‘No!’”
Her marriage ended. The songs didn’t come. Then one finally did, the rueful, dissonant Lucky Man. “There’s no promised land,” Mvula intones. A gorgeous, unexpected, Disney-calibre fantasia at the end offsets the bleakness.
Mvula fell in love again. Her anxieties peaked. Then she and her new love broke up suddenly. (“‘I can’t be what you need,’ he said! What does that mean?” she asks the crowd. “He’s a dick!” comes the reply.) A song on The Dreaming Room was originally named after him. On the album, it’s a spacious, bittersweet love song called Kiss My Feet. As Mvula tells it tonight, it’s actually called “Kiss My Black Ass”.
This is the maverick, bloody-minded Mvula – the one who sips a goblet of red wine through a straw; who named her keytar after her idol, Nina Simone; whose little black dress comes with a paint-effect skunk stripe down the back; one whose video visuals have often been euphorically Afrocentric. Last summer she railed against a music industry that is sexist, racist “and lots of – ists”.
Her music carries with it a love of the baroque; Show Me Love, another highlight tonight, has unconventional jazz sensibilities. Moreover, there are those songs that layer celestial, multitracked vocals over strong circular rhythms. The prime example is Green Garden, the beguiling, bells-and-handclap single that introduced the then-receptionist to her audience in 2013. (Does she play it tonight? Nope.) Instead, Angel, off the new album, channels the kind of mantric polyphony psych fans would look for in a Panda Bear rave remix.
People finally do get up to dance to Phenomenal Woman, a tune that takes its inspiration from a Maya Angelou poem and its cues from 70s funk. You do wish this Laura Mvula were given bigger props – and a much freer rein.
