Lady Sovereign The Roadhouse, Manchester
After going to see Lady Sovereign at The Roadhouse I found myself asking why I was reviewing her for a Hip Hop website at all. It was like watching a precocious teenager pull off a passable solo rock performance.
However, the fact I (and others) had been led to think ‘Lady Sov’ was relevant to UKHH makes want to write about it anyway – but more on that later.
Following performances from Manchester’s own City Is Ours camp – there’s potential there but it still needs to step up a level– and a sudden burst of 2005’s bigger grime tunes, a guitarist and a bassplayer walk out onto stage. I am a little perturbed by this as electric guitars didn’t really figure in my plans for the evening. A kind of drama/doom/funk themed riff is struck up very loud, and there’s a buzz of anticipation in the respectably packed Roadhouse as Lady Sov appears centre stage. She looks about 14 - with no make up, side ponytail, hoodie baggy as an oversized dress she comes across seriously young - and that’s not a diss in any way, but does need to be mentioned as it was a big feature of her performance.
She looks wary, gripping the top of the mic close to her face, but launches straight into a well-timed if unremarkable rendition of Fiddle With the Volume. She can carry off a live performance with ease, from the spitfire delivery of a grimier than usual, high energy Chi Ching (punctuated in perfect tune with its falsettoed hook), through the old school cockney singsong style of 9 to 5 (which suits her distinctive creaky door singing voice best of all) to her final (album title) track ‘Public Warning’, an MTV generation punk affair which she bellows as raucously as her small voice will allow. Along with ‘My England’, this new track has a crowd-pleaser of a chorus, clearly aimed at the masses who merrily chanted ‘lager lager lager’ along with Underworld and er…whatever it was Mike Skinner said along with him and felt a vague British pride while they were at it.
This is the thing. Her MCing - sharp on Hoodie and pleasingly lazy on Random might suggest there’s a passing relevance to Hip Hop here, added to her emergence from the Grime scene whose associations with Hip Hop are self evident. But she’s been plucked out, brushed down, marketed up to the nines and as she swings around the stage, supping Stella and getting the crowd’s arms up in the air and swaying in time, the nearest we get to Hip Hop is a feeling of a Goldie Looking Chains’ errant little cousin (This is not to say that Lady Sovereign is on a par with GLC if I disliked her as much as those jokers I wouldn’t be writing this at all – the comparison is purely to give you a sense of her stage presence).
She’s a good performer, she can certainly sing, her interaction with the crowd is unaffected and natural and - for one so new to the game - she’s got an impressive collection of excited fans thronging to the front and jostling for a free sovereign ring giveaway (‘vey make your finger go green after like, 40 minutes or sumfink, it ain’t real gold’). She’s also improving fast, with the live renditions of Hoodie and Random leaving her first recorded outings for dust, and the peculiar, forced MC Bassman-like ragga gruffness is pretty much left behind as she gets into her stride.
But all in all there’s something that feels a bit contrived. She can ride any style and has had producers from Basement Jaxx to the cream of the USA big guns lining up to work with her but this versatility being so heavily exploited before she’s properly established means it looks like she is being moulded exactly as per her record company’s cash-generating visions. And why shouldn’t she blow up big – she’s got a better voice than many ahead of her in the charts and something of her own personality (although the media hype is doing it’s best to crush that with a caricature) but it’s the road to CD:UK popsterdom that I see her heading down. Ok her album’s gonna be out on Def Jam and her pronounced Lahndan vowels’ll soon be found atop Pharrell beats and alongside Missy but I have seen it with my own eyes and I say it’s NOT Hip Hop.
all in all there’s something that feels a bit contrived
- Kate Novo
- photo's by Shirlaine
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