There’s an almost David Byrneish awkwardness to the singer’s self-presentation, but the tunes are straightforwardly winning
wenty minutes into Aldous Harding’s set, after a spellbinding version of Treasure, from her 2019 breakthrough album, has provoked a particularly vociferous response from the crowd, she speaks her first words to the audience. It feels oddly like a warning. “I am friendly and open,” she says. “But we do have to do things my way.”
As warnings go, it feels a little after the fact: you could have worked out Harding is intent on doing things her way pretty much from the moment she walked on stage. That means a gig punctuated by long, pregnant silences – “the no charisma between songs thing”, as she puts it – during which Harding adjusts her microphone stand, moves a chair across the stage and switches instruments, which she has a habit of looking at as if she’s never seen them before.
When not playing an instrument – a nylon stringed guitar, a tambourine which she flaps up and down vertically rather than shaking, a cabasa – she accompanies her vocals with stagey movements, stalking around while slowly turning her head from side to side like someone walking into an unfamiliar environment and sizing it up, or dancing with a deliberately tentative ineptness, as if she’s at the edge of a dancefloor, unsure of whether to join in.
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