Hannah Scott, Worthing Pavilion Theatre Atrium review - filling an arctic venue with human warmth

London-based singer-songwriter Hannah Scott has warned her next song may reduce us to tears. It is, she says, inspired by events following the death of beloved father. The undertaker advised her, and her sister, that it wasn’t really done for women to bear the coffin. They considered this and ignored it. The resulting song, over a simply repeating piano motif played on her Roland keyboard, is called “Carry You Out” (“You carried me into this world/I will carry you out”).

I look around and multiple hands are brushing at faces that silently stream with tears. Hannah Scott deals in weepies. But not shmaltz. This is catharsis.

It's a miracle she succeeds at all in this environment. The Pavilion Theatre Atrium is cavernous and freezing (if you’ve seen the film Empire of Light, it’s the space, overlooking the sea, where Olivia Colman attends ballroom dance sessions). It’s laid out cabaret style, the small crowd isolated at table islands, wrapped in coats, scarves and hats, a desolate scene redolent of Worthing’s fusty past rather than its current artistic vibrancy. Unfortunately, the sound is also not ideal, the instrumentation lacking heft, the guitar tone damp.

These negatives, then, are not due to Scott’s performance. In a small cosy venue, this might have been one of the gigs of the year.  As it is, she makes a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Blond parted hair, one side shaved, she’s clad unpretentiously in a dark jacket, tight black trousers and boots, looking a little like a dressage rider. She veers between the keyboard and guitar, depending on the song.

She wins because of her voice, her lyrics and the autobiographical journey she leads us on. She describes her music as folk but it is, as much, classic middle-of-the-road fare. Some artists inhabit this territory but elevate it, from The Carpenters to Adele, and she is one such. Her voice is haunting, vulnerable, sometimes childlike. It reaches inside you as only certain singers can, intimating something desperately human, almost the way Sinead O’Connor was able to (albeit sounding absolutely nothing like that singer).

It takes a while for Scott’s magic to work. She opens with two strong songs from her new album, Absence of Doubt, which I think is her third, but the room’s vibe swallows them. Sober and earnest, although not humourless, she lacks casual banter. But, slowly, she draws us into her world.

“Lines” is perceptively about ageing, but it’s “San Francisco” that ramps things up, about her P&O entertainer father’s final visit to that city in his ill old age. “No Gravity” is her best-known song as it opened an episode of the apparently endless TV medical drama Gray’s Anatomy (“Season 17, episode 3,” she says wryly). Unbelievably, just before the encore, she even musters a moving singalong in this dead space, as we all join in the chorus of “Sitting in the Dark”, an uncharacteristic, socially angry song about the ruthless disregard of landlords.

In the second half, she tells us she’s pleased no-one has left the building. In truth, this is because she’s hooked us in. She plays “Hurricanes”, with its lyrics about the need for life’s curveballs to inspire art (“What passion can burn in the absence of hunger?”) and tells us about how her Radio 2 session for Dermot O’Leary. With her everyday stories of family life and admissions that she’s usually getting ready for bed by 8.45, she is indeed very BBC Radio 2 and very not rock’n’roll.

It makes no odds. There’s a quiet power to songs such as the angry “Shape”, about her grandma not speaking to her mother for 20 years (much better live than the bombastic recorded version), “Boy in the Frame”, which imagines her other grandmother had been able to share some of her nearly 100 years on earth with her brother, who died a teenager, and “My Dad and I”, a warmly nostalgic skiffle-ish number which manages to use the word “daddy” without being icky.

Hannah Scott deserves a much wider audience. In a frenetic world, where so many are remote from one and other, strained by status anxiety and online nonsense, her songs remind that the ordinary stuff of life is truly extraordinary, that we are lucky to be alive, to be able to feel, even when it’s painful. And all in a voice that is a revelation.

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Below: Listen to "Bigger Than My Body" by Hannah Scott