Her dues paid with several hit songwriting and guest vocal credits, including singing on Professor Green's current No 1 Read All About It, Emeli Sandé is the latest young female R&B vocalist set to ditch the "feat" prefix that is such a rite of passage for new UK artists.
The first show of the 24-year-old's debut headline tour begins with her four-piece band's epic instrumental intro fizzling out into an ugly buzz and expressions of bemusement as technical issues reign. But it's the only thing false about this start for one of the surest things of the next year in pop, whose extravagantperoxide quiff hairdressers ought to start familiarising themselves with.
Sandé's album Our Version of Events looks set to be an all-bases-covered affair. Suitcase is a straightforward emotive breakup song akin to Beyoncé's mopier moments; Daddy contrastingly embraces trip-hop beats and slithering strings in pursuit of something darker. It's when Sandé's alone at the piano – "This is where it all started," she notes, "before I hooked up with any cool rappers" – that her voice best reveals its natural soulfulness. Hope, co-written with Alicia Keys, could be Sandé's Someone Like You.
Her various guest turns – on Chipmunk's Diamond Rings and Wiley's Never Be Your Woman included – are visited in medley form. Her No 2 solo hit Heaven makes a decent fist of giving Massive Attack's Unfinished Sympathy an uptempo makeover.
The bleakness of some of Sandé's lyrics has already been noted, and while you suspect she could switch on whichever emotion might be required when penning tunes for artists as diverse as Leona Lewis, Susan Boyle and Cher Lloyd (Simon Cowell has called Sandé his "favourite songwriter at the minute", a compliment that will probably reflect better on him than it will her in time), she's at her best when making bliss out of agony, as Maybe's lament for a romance in its death throes proves at the close.
