Ice queen or new age guru? Laura Marling takes to the stage in Cambridge dressed all in roomy, androgynous whites, her bleached crop and pale skin almost giving off their own light.
The 25-year-old singer-songwriter and her three-piece band assemble gradually throughout the mesmerising opening song, Howl, performing against a desert tableau filmed as the sun rises, peaks and sets. This time-lapsed “day” lasts as long as Marling’s riveting 90-minute gig, and illustrates a set of American-inspired songs in which many events unfold at dawn, dusk or night-time, in wildernesses both external and internal.
Howl begins with Marling leaving a sleeping lover, regretting the dawn; on the nervy rock of False Hope she is an insomniac on the Upper West Side as hurricane Sandy hits. On How Can I, it’s the middle of the night and she is in the desert, looking at the moon. It will soon be gone, like the relationship in the song.
Over five albums, Marling has gone from exuding a kind of self-assured diffidence – an ice queen, if you like – to a mixture of stern and wry. Her songs bear witness to a shifting juxtaposition of standoffish toughness and vulnerability.
She cracks a few more jokes between songs nowadays, largely at her own expense. After the joyous, noisy thrum of Rambling Man, Marling confides her excitement at the thought that someone, spurred by the din, was about to climb on someone else’s shoulders. It would have been “a Laura Marling first”. “But,” she concludes, “it was just someone taking off their jumper.” The last time she played here, the gig was all-seated. Now it’s standing.
Tonight’s attentive audience is a mixture of willowy, satchel-toting students and more mature genre aficionados – Cambridge has hosted a venerable annual folk festival since 1964, after all – all witnessing the tour on which Marling, already an extraordinary talent, goes properly electric. This is by no means the first time that the singer has plugged in, but these dates, supporting her latest album, Short Movie, not only showcase Marling’s increasingly muscular songs, but rescore old songs to the new, wiry mood.
Some, like What He Wrote from I Speak Because I Can (2010), remain familiar, just transposed on to a ringing semi-acoustic with no accompaniment. But Take the Night Off, part of a suite of songs from Marling’s last album, Once I Was an Eagle, is given a makeover. Every time Marling sings “be bad for me”, guitarist Pete Randell, bassist Nick Pini and drummer Matt Ingram crank up a gear, and Marling’s own guitar motif grows more strident. Twenty intense minutes go by before we are allowed the space to whoop.
This is not the only development. Marling’s voice has always been elastic – whispering, sneering or soaring by turns – but her phrasings and inflections have only grown more eloquent. Given she’s having to yell over a rock band, keeping this variety intact is no mean feat. She has been covering Jackson C Frank’s song, Blues Run the Game, for some time, but tonight’s rendition has a lived-in feel, in which this previously sheltered Englishwoman begins to approach the headspace of the late US songwriter, whose troubles ended when he died at the age of 56, having endured paranoid schizophrenia and homelessness.
You get the feeling that, with two London gigs out of the way, Marling is as relaxed as she gets tonight. She talks about the previous night’s show in London where, as a special sop to her father, whose Neil Young and Joni Mitchell records sparked the young Marling’s interest in songwriting, she performed a rare encore. The song – Daisy – was his favourite; she left it off the album. Its punchline goes: “A woman alone is not a woman undone” – a fitting conclusion to this gripping run of songs about relationships, in which Marling has toughened up in more ways than one.
