Opening acts don’t always enjoy a full house, but at at the Royal Albert Hall at the end of a UK tour in support of Suzanne Vega and her acclaimed new album Flying with Angels, there was a warm and generous welcome for singer-songwriter Katherine Priddy’s opening five-song set, drawn from her first two albums, The Eternal Rocks Beneath and The Pendulum Swing, and featuring a preview from the third, These Frightening Machines, due in March.
The new song is “Matches”, about the witch trials, but a springboard, too, to broader and wider concerns that persist and exist beyond historical time. They are always with us. As with another of her concentrated, intense, marvellously performed songs in the set, “Eurydice”, myth and metaphor set off a shifting complex of meanings. “Matches” uses imagery of consumption by fire, by fear and hate, and the resulting smog that creates extends far beyond the material history of the trials of the 16th century, extending into our inner selves.
“They were hunting and burning women, not witches,” she says in her introduction, and at the song’s end sings,:“Did they know we have matches too?”
The night’s headliner Suzanne Vega has made album of the year on a few lists – Rolling Stone and Mojo among them – and drew fervent applause as she took to the stage, popping a black top hat and launching into an excellent version of “Marlene on the Wall” with her long-time musical accomplice, guitarist Gerry Leonard and later, cellist Stephanie Winters, Leonard’s electric lines raising the necessary spectral vibes of Vega’s voice and lyrics.
She looks and sounds great; clothed in a charcoal black suit (“I Never Wear White” is a later set highlight), and casting some winning dice by playing a clutch of older, well-loved songs first – after “Marlene” comes 1992’s “99.9F” with its images of fire, desire, quenching and cooling leading to 1996’s “Caramel” and “Small Blue Thing”, which she had premiered to British audiences in this very hall 39 years ago. “It was a real thrill being here the first time,” she told us, “but it’s even more of a thrill coming back.”
The title track of her new album holds up well beside the very funny “Chambermaid”, ripping off and riffing off Dylan’s “I Want You”, and framed by one of several great between-song stories and asides she delivered through the evening. Here she recalled impulsively kissing Dylan on the cheek after a gig with him in Norway in the early Nineties. “He blinked but he didn’t flinch”. Result...
Foundational classics “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner” – the former a spine-tingling performance of a powerful and haunting song – came before the encore, which included her friend Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side. She plays it at all her concerts, and was a keeper in a set that cast a New York state of mind across a full house of fervent fans, already enchanted by Priddy’s superlative opening set. I predict KP will soon be headlining here; maybe sooner rather than later.
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