As the live music industry cautiously dusts itself off, north London’s Union Chapel is in the lucky position of being made for social distancing: its airy stalls and domed ceiling offer the closest thing to an outdoor experience you’ll find at an indoor venue. Celeste, on the other hand, is an indoor artist, excelling in spaces small enough to preserve her fragility and unease.
As such, the cavernous chapel isn’t the soul-jazz singer’s natural home, but here she is anyway, presiding over five sold-out nights. It feels a considerable step outside her comfort zone. The first words of tonight’s opening song, Ideal Woman, might transmit bumptious confidence – “I like to think it’s because I’m too proud? Too proud, too proud, too loud / Some others may say it’s because I’m so tall / But that doesn’t bother me at all” – but it’s the little things that tell. When she briefly speaks to announce song titles or admit she has stage fright, her voice is tiny; when she moves to the music, it’s from the waist up, feet seemingly glued to the stage. And for every girl-boss Ideal Woman in the setlist, there are two that fret and gnaw their cuticles. (A quivering Father’s Son, which pointedly addresses absent fathers, needs a shout-out here.)
It appears that she’ll have to get used to bigger rooms. Tickets are going for up to £360 each on secondary sites, which answers one question, at least: can the Los Angeles-born, Brighton-bred 27-year-old regain the momentum that was building just before Covid? Having won the BBC Sound of 2020 poll and the Brits Rising Star award, and transfixed the audience at the Brits live show with the eerie ballad Strange, it looked as if 2020 would be hers. The pandemic put paid to that, forcing the cancellation of a tour and delaying her debut album, Not Your Muse, by months. But she’s taking up where she left off. Finally released in January, Not Your Muse reached No 1, and the adoring fan reaction tonight says that Celeste is the right person to fill a space triangulated by Adele, Amy Winehouse and Norah Jones.
Her performance gets its kapow from its restraint. Endowed with husky but powerful pipes, she could atomise the stained-glass window above the stage, but comes close only once, on last year’s jazz-funk radio hit Stop This Flame. The audience, separated into “seating pods”, rise as one at this point, and it’s a joyous moment, but it’s the evening’s outlier. The show’s hallmark is the stillness and vocal poise that distinguishes Celeste from the current intake of young pop singers. Her jazzy backing band’s velvety soundbeds unobtrusively melt into the background, and there’s no edge to any of this. It’s unabashedly mainstream music, albeit with emotional heft – the crack in her voice when she sings, on The Promise, “Remember when we overslept that morning, when our thing fell apart?” is killingly real. As a post-lockdown tonic, it works.
