Singing pop songs has turned into something of an arms race of late. Thanks in no small part to the bear pit of TV talent shows, female singers are now required to holler louder, longer and more fiercely than the next girl; their notes need to bend more ways than a wrestler in a torture chamber. "Smashing it" is the grail – a display of firepower, not restraint; a surfeit of heat, to the detriment of nuance.
Jessie Ware, 27, from Brixton, is different. Having spent the past couple of years appearing on a number of tracks by post-dubstep types – she sang three tracks on SBTRKT's celebrated debut album last year – Ware is about to release her own debut, Devotion. She can smash it, but chooses not to. There are moments during tonight's lean, hungry headline set – 40 minutes, no encore – where Ware holds a big note then whips her head away from the microphone, pulling back from the overkill. It happens on Running, the last song in the set, and earlier, on No to Love, greeted by whoops each time. The appreciative crowd crammed into this small Brixton club is probably divided 70/30 between fans and her friends and family. Her mum hasn't bought all the tickets this time, Ware grins, but her friend Phil has brought the entire bridge club along.
Ware's Devotion comes out on Monday 20 August, and it replaces the fancy vocal vaulting de nos jours with a more glacial glide through British R&B, pop, soul and electronic music that owes far more to Sade than it does Adele (a friend of Ware's). You would not know it to hear her, but Ware went to school with Florence Welch, Jack Peñate and Maccabee Felix White.
Fellow south Londoner Katy B is more of a musical fellow traveller. Both she and Ware came up putting vocals on tracks with the swishy rattle of drum'n'bass or the judder of dubstep beneath them, before turning their aerated voices to bold pop. Sampha – another incumbent British soul voice – joins Ware on stage for two tracks tonight, the compelling, SBTRKT-produced vulnerable duet Valentine and, less successfully, What You Won't Do for Love.
But where Katy B sounds fresh and girlish, despite the hours she puts in clubbing, Ware seems more grown-up, something of a cross between Greek statuary and a glam pub landlady; she was, until fairly recently, a budding journalist on the Jewish Chronicle. Her best songs are downbeat, pregnant with tamped-down feeling. The greatest by far, tonight, is Wildest Moments, a big, forlorn tune about a volatile friendship where Ware's resigned sweetness plays off against the big drums and electronic feints.
The debt to Sade is one Ware admits freely, and it's not merely musical. Ware looks immaculate, her bequiffed up-do offset by big earrings and eyebrows sculpted as though by lasers. Her videos are luxe affairs (for now, on a budget) that hark back to the posing 80s, but in a way that doesn't make you cringe.
In person, though, Ware is no ice queen. She exhorts the front row to tell her if she gets lipstick on her teeth. She spends time explaining how songs came to be; who they are for. There's one, the slightly too gloomy Taking in Water, for her little brother; another, the slightly too breezy Sweet Talk, that she wrote with Julio Bashmore, a Bristol house DJ-turned-producer who shares credits on Devotion with the Invisible's Dave Okumu. Okumu joins in tonight as well, a big bear of a man whose resemblance to Soul II Soul's Jazzie B is coincidental.
But when her band – a mixed blessing of guitar, bass, drums and electronics – start up, Ware is transformed. She becomes her bone structure – elegant, chiselled. Mostly, the songs measure up. 110% retains a little drum'n'bass, but quickly transforms into the kind of brisk pop nugget that reminds you of the run of Scandinavian popstrels five years ago, headed by Robyn. Sometimes, as on Night Light, however, the fug of lounge funk threatens to suck Ware into disposability. The perils ahead are clear. Ware could easily become more soul-pop cannon fodder, just another coo in the churn of singers. To avoid that she needs to stay chilled.
