In the four years since Alicia Keys’s last album, Girl on Fire, the Grammy winner has remained in the spotlight more due to her campaigning than her singing. In 2013, she started the We Are Here movement for social justice, and in May this year, her essay for Lena Dunham’s online magazine, Lenny, launched a million hashtags with her intention to resist pressure to conform by forgoing makeup.
Keys herself has relented on her recent quest to stop mobile phones coming into her gigs and plenty of handsets capture her arrival to this Apple Music festival show, barefaced, beaming and clad in a shapeless T-shirt dress that looks like a souvenir from Camden market. She dives into her new song Gospel, a homage to her home town from her upcoming sixth album, inspired by the hip-hop of her youth, and it has her dancing joyously.
Keys stands at her piano for the urgent rallying call 28 Thousand Days, her voice strong and determined. But since 2001 she’s honed a fine line in soft, love-scrutinising soul, her classic melodies and Motown-indebted sound casting her as the sultry, more introverted sibling to Beyoncé’s bold and experimental big sister. Approving of the intimacy of her surroundings, Keys offers to “throw you a basement party. A good place to grind and groove,” and her honeyed voice does just that with You Don’t Know My Name, along with Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart and Fallin’, two favourites adorned with big notes.
She’s joined by London soul artist Sampha for Un-thinkable (I’m Ready) and he performs his new single Blood on Me, which, despite Keys’ harmonies and appreciation, goes on for too long, especially when her own new material is so intriguing.
These songs see Keys in strident mood, with She Don’t Really Care and In Common mixing up spacey synths and Latin rhythms with stronger songwriting and focus. Keys acknowledges there’s been a change. “I feel like I’m back to life, back in my zone!” she says gleefully, as a sample of the Soul II Soul hit Back to Life kicks off her own, more introspective song of the same name.
She precedes the impassioned, hymn-like Hallelujah with concerns about the refugee crisis, noting that the biological father of Steve Jobs, who “revolutionised our lives”, was a Syrian refugee. The song is an example of Keys’s gift for marrying global concerns to personal conflict, but she’s just as startling on the sweet pop of If I Ain’t Got You and the dramatic Girl on Fire.
Despite confessing to sweltering in her garb (“Y’know if your arms are sweating its really good”) she segues into No One and ends with stirring singalong Empire State of Mind (Part II) Broken Down. “I love you so much, it’s indescribable,” Keys says. “But you might need a tiny bit more air-conditioning in the Roundhouse.”
