It may not be a particularly crowded field, but no one has ever looked as good wielding a keytar as Laura Mvula. On a smoke-shrouded stage, she hefts a dazzlingly white symbol of 1980s tech-funk with something approaching swagger. Like her fluid but fissured voice, it’s an instrument a little out of time, but is no less effective for it.
It has been an eventful year for the Birmingham-born soul singer. Ahead of the release of her second album, The Dreaming Room, Mvula spoke candidly and often about her struggles with anxiety and heartbreak. Post-release, things seem to have been heading in the right direction: she made the Mercury shortlist, received multiple Mobo nominations and sang a sumptuous version of Abide With Me for the Queen at the recent Festival of Remembrance.
Despite this promising trajectory, Mvula seems to intuitively understand the precariousness of things. “You need this, I need this,” she tells the crowd. “Let’s get it on!” As the eye-catching nexus for her tight five-piece band – including a sci-fi cello and a keyboard stack capable of blasting out huge orchestral swells – she interleaves soaring cosmic-soul songs with a stream of equally heartfelt, if occasionally surreal, stage banter.
She jokes that her mum is only interested in hearing about her debut album. She bravely attempts a Scottish brogue. She hauls a fan up on stage for a smooch during Flying Without You, a rebound ballad threaded with a militaristic beat. As the temperature rises, she waves away her sweat. “Let’s just pretend I look sexy,” she says, to a rowdy response. Much has been made of Mvula’s training in classical composition but her best songs owe as much to jazz inflections, from casually slippery time signatures to leap-of-faith chord progressions. Her voice is what binds together the disparate elements: the swooning Lucky Man soars on eddies of colliery brass, while Sing to the Moon is punctuated by harmonic strings that sound like whalesong.
Audience singalongs usually work best when they are kept very simple but during the sparse, stripped-back Bread, Mvula coaxes a complex chorus of “lay the breadcrumb down” from the crowd, a murmured canticle that – once locked in – she scats and vamps on top of, unamplified. It is one of the highlights of an enthralling 90-minute show that runs long, seemingly just because Mvula is having such a good time. “I’m literally going to walk off stage to the tour bus and cry my eyes out,” she says, setting off a rolling wave of cheers and applause that, perhaps inevitably, brings her close to tears.
Oddly, there’s no room for her current single, a nervy version of the evergreen Delfonics track Ready or Not currently being used to soundtrack a department store Christmas ad. Instead, she encores with a moving cover of Nina Simone’s Be My Husband. If it feels like there might be an easier course for Mvula to chart, one that steers harder toward the voodoo retro of Amy Winehouse or the deluxe balladry of Adele, it’s all the more impressive that she seems so focused on doing her own thing.
- At Rock City, Nottingham, 17 November. Box office: 0845-413 4444. At O2 Institute, Birmingham, 19 November. Tickets: 0844-477 2000. Then touring.
