Thumbnail sketches rarely do anyone justice. But if you know anything about Shura – a Moscow-born, Manchester-raised, up’n’coming singer-producer, swigging beer from a bottle as she swaps between guitar and keyboard – you will have garnered two salient facts: that the video for her breakout song, 2014’s Touch, featured a great many of her friends kissing each other irrespective of gender, and that Shura is the latest in a long line of 21st-century solo females – from Gaga all the way down to Ronika – paying tribute to Madonna.
Even without its accompanying video, live, Touch remains a stand-out, a winning cocktail of analogue warmth and just-so cool. It’s even moved on a little since last year, with Shura’s dulcet keyboard melody shifting slightly eastwards tonight, almost suggesting Japan (the country, not the 80s act).
More juicy factoids lend colour to the sketch. There’s Shura’s gap year rewilding pumas in South America, the fact that she writes her own stuff, and her tweet about joining the Labour party “for less than half the price of a Spotify subscription”. But for now, the story remains snogging, a Ciccone fetish, and persistent buzz, being drip-fed by singles. In June, Shura released a beautifully shot short film of three of her songs; July’s White Light was one of Radio 1’s Hottest Records in the World. In the near future, Touch will finally be coming out as a purchasable song.
Shura’s specific take on Madonna, meanwhile, is less all-conquering peroxide dominatrix, and more vintage New York club kid, generous of bone structure, bushy of eyebrow and redolent of Holiday on an incrementally seductive song called Indecision.
In the end, only one of these two core impressions survives a night in her company. Touch’s actually quite chaste kissing video is now up to 17.9m views. A deal with Polydor has been struck, and Aleksandra Denton’s debut album is currently being compressed and gated within an inch of its life, with an assumed 2015 release date – she was on the BBC Sound of 2015 longlist – pushed back to early 2016.
In an hour, Shura and her three lanky male bandmates run through roughly half of its tracklisting, swapping between keyboards and guitars, their effects-laden atmospheres lent further 80s clout by a stand-up drummer energetically thwacking drum pads at the back.
Four songs into this sold-out date, the opening bars of Indecision raise a delirious whoop. An appreciative shuffle ripples through the 1,500-strong crowd. And that’s where the Madonna thing ends. It’s a total red herring. Often overpowered by her effects-soaked music, Shura’s saturated coo actually sounds more like mid-80s Janet Jackson, but with a concussion where Jackson’s funk was. Too much of the evening passes in a dreamy haze, with watery guitar lines sounding like keyboards, and soft rock synths aping guitars.
A little recalibration is fruitful. On a good run, Shura recalls the xx playing Haim’s If I Could Change Your Mind or La Roux trying to master the keyboard sound off Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer. And while some of the newer songs – like Nothing’s Real – have more of a ravey oomph to them, Shura’s forte is bittersweet yearning, as evinced on songs like 2Shy. More than once tonight, she recalls Jessie Ware, whom Shura remixed last year; no bad thing.
Many, many artists remain enraptured with the sleekness of the 80s, rather than its chutzpah and playfulness; indeed, the 80s revival is now more or less a decade-and-a-half old, if we’re counting from the electro-clash fad of the turn of the millennium, and much of it revolves around texture, rather than spirit. Still, it’s hard not to feel disappointed that getting into the groove is not Shura’s intention; her overproduced melancholy could, perhaps, use a little more dip-dyed blonde ambition.
