“That’s never happened before,” Lucy Rose says, as she fights to compose herself between fits of repulsed laughter, eventually resorting to tugging her T-shirt hem up over her nose. Someone somewhere near the front of the audience in this tightly packed room has shamelessly violated gig etiquette by unapologetically emitting an odour so potent it’s pungent even on stage. Surely no amount of touring teaches a musician how to handle a situation like this. But even in the most stinking of circumstances this 25-year-old Warwickshire indie-folkie siren– the kind of artist to sell her own brands of tea and chocolate as merch, and let a young local singer-songwriter whom she met the previous night open for her in Edinburgh – is unflappably lovely (she borrows her bassist’s mic to sing All I’ve Got, gaining some extra distance from the anonymous culprit).
Rose’s rise to prominence began as a vocalist with Bombay Bicycle Club, whose frontman Jack Steadman’s influence was clearly a formative one on her soft and gently quavering voice. Much of tonight’s set comes from Rose’s forthcoming second album Work It Out, which between a preponderance of highlife-y guitar lines, knotty arrangements and electronic twitches – see Our Eyes especially – similarly seems to share qualities which have taken BBC to the summit of the British charts.
Night Bus and Like An Arrow are songs so spotless you doubt they hide dirt even beneath their fingernails. A little bit more grit in Rose’s sound could be the difference between her voice merely facelessly soundtracking more mobile phone adverts, and one day slaying concert hall crowds. A kind of loveliness fatigue sets in by the time Feist-like acoustic ode Shiver arrives.
Amid a welcomely uptempo finale, the jagged, jerky and danceable Sheffield is much more like it, giving Rose a chance to prove her sharp guitar chops. Apologising for playing for so long and talking so much before Red Face closes are pronouncements true to polite form for Rose – but she needn’t always be so nice.
• At Concorde 2, Brighton (01273 673311), 17 March, and touring until 1 April.
