Beth Gibbons, the singer and lyricist from the trip hop pioneers Portishead, captivated Camden’s sold-out Roundhouse on Friday evening with a spellbinding solo show.
Focusing mainly on songs from her 2024 Mercury Music Prize nominated album Lives Outgrown, she performed all ten album tracks with a full band, including strings and brass. The powerful performance also included a treat for Portishead fans, with the pertinent fan favourites ‘Roads’ and ‘Glory Box’ in the roof raising encore. Her set also had a couple of songs from the 2002 Rustin Man collaboration album Out of Season, including ‘Mysteries’.
Beth’s voice is so unique, at times sounding like a human theremin, with crystal clear and note perfect lyrics. She is immensely captivating for someone who moves around the stage so little, and famously speaks so little too between songs. She thanked the audience and thumbs upped us with such humble gratitude, but if you’re after banter and stories you’re in the wrong place.
The sparse chat between songs takes nothing away from the spectacular show – the focus is so clearly on the music, with Beth herself watching her musicians with the same focused intensity as the audience did, the strings, keys, brass, guitars and percussion surrounding her bathed in red and blue soft light.
The audience couldn’t take their eyes off of her in the pin-drop silence they so respectfully created as they watched in awe. As she hunched over her microphone stand, you could know it’s her just by the silhouette. The lighting does not draw your attention to her, with the bright white spotlights cast over the audience instead of the stage. It seems she has gone out of her way to be heard and not seen, yet into the dark stage we all stare as her songs command us to look in her direction with utter reverence.
Beth has assembled a band who play perfectly to accompany her intricate and iconic vocals, every single percussive note was so professionally placed and slick. There is zero room for fault or spontaneity in her precision perfect show of musicianship. She is hands-down one of the greatest vocalists in the decades her career spans, she can be recognised within a single note, and it’s this famed and celebrated voice which continues to maintain her dedicated following.
She has a predominantly older audience, people who seemingly went through the nineties with her, and can possibly be closer to understanding the content of Lives Outgrown, which eloquently explores grief and ageing. In the transfixed crowd you can see people connecting with the topics she so beautifully sings about, as many people had tears in their eyes and were being moved into a very personal connection with the music.
There is a power in how she commands so much attention with her voice, but she belts out that fragility in the most goosebump-inducing way, demanding every single audience member to hang on her every word, and we did. For an artist so well known, it was like being part of music’s best kept secret despite her decades long career and accolades. She is one of the most personal performers you can experience and as she hunches over that microphone she may as well be whispering into your ear one to one. Spellbinding in every sense.
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