Laura Marling at The BBC Proms review – a waif won the heart of a nation
At last Sunday’s BBC Proms, in an eerily empty Albert Hall, a waif won the heart of a nation. Or, at least the part of the nation determined to burrow into the schedules of BBC Four to seek out singer, Laura Marling’s spellbinding performance in a programme dedicated almost entirely to her own work.
Sod the row over Rule Britannia lyrics. Why, oh why, does our public service broadcaster consider Antiques Roadshow (BBC 1) or Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing (BBC 2) of greater significance than their annual Promfest? This is musical distancing gone berserk.
Those who fought their way to the BBC scheduling boondocks of Four were in for a treat. But what was going on? In her introduction presenter, Susie Klein, egged on by sidekick music broadcaster Edith Bowman, drum-rolled Laura as a prodigious talent. A second coming! A musical Messiah!
Really? Surely, she is just a 30 year-old-folk singer from Berkshire – and London and Los Angeles? Who launched her debut album at the age of 16. And, has eight albums published and the beginnings of a film career in Woman Driver. Ah, yes… I am beginning to see what they’re on about.
Viewers unfamiliar with the slight, blond-haired, pin-stripe clad paradox, Laura Marling, must have wondered as – inscrutably composed as ever she faced the12 Ensemble, her unaccustomed accompanying string orchestra – what Klein and Bowman had been smoking before the show. Were they over-egging the musical pudding?
As it turned out, it was, if anything, understatement from the ditsy duo. There followed 90 minutes of self-revelation from a musical talent at the top of her game who is set less to define the folk/folk-rock genre in which she is commonly placed, as create a genre entirely of her own.
Disclosure time. I know the Marling family. We first met when the family came on holiday to our home in Portugal in 2006. Laura was 14. She impressed our children by escaping her parents’ attention – she thought – and secretly puffing on a fag, round the back of the villa.
Our kids had her sussed early as a rebel, so it was only a slight surprise when, at the age of 16 she released her first album, Alas, I Cannot Swim. The great surprise was that it was so musically appealing, instantly mature and with lyrics so original- she writes her own.
Charlie, Laura’s dad, had a music studio at their Berkshire home which she was introduced to as a child. Mum, Judi, is a music teacher. Charlie is also an accomplished water colourist. So, Laura’s artistic DNA was set.
From the off, Laura’s compositions were sharp, unafraid of confronting difficult personal experiences. She not only has a story to tell. She has the boldness to tell it, warts and all. All her work has an autobiographical foundation. Consider the album titles: I speak Because I Can; A Creature I Don’t Know; Once I was an Eagle; Semper Femina; and, her latest release, Song for our Daughter. They chart a chosen course of self-revelation.
The rackety lives we all seek to hide she is brave enough to reveal in stark clarity in her lyrics:
With your clothes on the floor,
Taking advice from some old balding bore,
You’ll ask yourself,
Did I want this at all?
Ouch! That’s an example from Song for our Daughter, her latest release. And then in Fortune, from the same album, my ears pricked up to this:
You took out that money,
That your Momma had saved,
She told me she kept it,
For running away,
Oh my,
Fortunes can change.
When I emailed Charlie to congratulate him on Laura’s performance, I couldn’t resist tweaking his tail: “Does that mean Judi has a running away fund?” Turns out she does, a jar of saved change for special treats.
It is a bit of a thing. My wife Anne shelters a running away fund in a mega Bells whisky bottle. We live in Wandsworth. With prudent use, it might take her as far as Clapham. There’s an ugly rumour doing the rounds that I am urging her to spend it. The genius of Laura’s lyrics is that they rely on shrewd, incidental observations like this to amplify character.
No personal relationship horror is masked. Yet, none of this shocking exposure descends to a self-pitying, “he done me wrong,” mawkish lament. Laura often gives as good as she gets on the relationship battlefield. She recounts experience absorbed, understood, acted upon, then reflects them in her lyrics. There are no conclusions, never any preaching. Learn and move on. What she has to tell her audiences is always thought provoking.
Laura’s musical style is melodic, making intelligent use of her vocal ability to span difficult intervals effortlessly. Some lyrics are spoken, to hammer home a point. A highly accomplished guitarist, she chooses her instrument carefully, often changing guitars between numbers to deliver the right tone.
It would be easy to fall into the “Laura Marling is the next XXX”; “her musical style harks back to YYY” comparison trap. But, defining her by reference, no matter how flattering, would be to do her injustice. She is, tout court, Laura Marling, with an evolving style of her own.
Behind the seemingly dead-pan approach there lurks a devilish sense of humour. In a comedy short, Awkward Coffee for Laura Marling and Tim Key, produced by Random Acts, she plays an aloof barista confronted by a geek, a regular customer who fancies herm and engages in elliptical conversation about chocolate dusting on lattes, in an attempt to summon up the courage to ask her for a date.
He polishes his unfashionable specs on a dun coloured shirt. She is a distant, white clad ice-barista, but with a vein of warm sympathy, refusing to dismiss him out of hand. The equivocation makes the piece hilarious. Her edgy, facial mannerisms portray reluctant curiosity at this guy’s presumption. Laura does comedy. She knows how to play on ambivalence.
Varium et mutabile semper femina – Fickle and changeable always is woman, says Virgil in his Aeneid. As does Laura. To the extreme of having Semper Femina tattooed on a thigh, apparently; “The full quote was too long.” Virgil was the inspiration for her Semper Femina album. There is no holding back.
Casual commentators classify her work as feminist, but it is more complicated than that. Listen with care to the lyrics and it becomes clear why it is difficult to pigeon-hole Laura in any slot. She is more interested in un-layering the behavioural contradictions of both sexes than proselytising for the sake of a cause.
On Sunday, the Albert Hall was transformed into a magical amphitheatre. Beams of light left pools of darkness. Laura faced the 12 Ensemble and in later sets performed solo, or with a quartet. Founded in 2012 by artistic directors Eloisa-Fleur Thom and Max Ruis, the unconducted ensemble has achieved international acclaim in chamber music performance.
The Ensemble’s sensitive arrangements added depth and grace to the songs, but it was when Laura was on her own with her guitar that she was at her most spellbinding. I cannot help feeling that orchestration softened the solar plexus blows her lyrics are designed to inflict.
Throughout the evening it was redundantly pointed out that there was no audience. Laura remarked that she liked it that way as the sound was better, unobstructed. But, in spite of distancing enforcement, there was an audience – of one. The glinting-gold bust of Sir Henry Wood, founder of the Proms and the principal conductor for 50 years, presided, often in shot, hovering, glowing eerily in the darkness.
What on earth was Sir Henry thinking as this singer bared her soul before him? Henry Wood’s prime objective was to bring the British people new forms of music with which they were perhaps unfamiliar. He was an enthusiastic enricher of lives. So, my money is on Sir Henry experiencing a surreptitious thrill on Sunday.
This may have been Awkward Performance for Laura Marling and Sir Henry Wood, but the Proms concert fulfilled his purpose; it innovated, provoked and entertained. Capturing Laura Marling at this point in her development in a dedicated solo performance was a high-risk decision that paid off in spades. God knows what superlatives Susie Klein and Edith Bowman will have to concoct next time to describe the art of Laura Marling, an artist in constant evolution.