Anna Calvi

The All Saints Church is a surprisingly vast venue, as high as it’s long, but serving to illuminate the diminutive Anna Calvi, striking as always in her red flamenco-style blouse. Quietly spoken in person, on stage her inner passion is unchained. But like the great flamenco performers, it’s a highly controlled, yet artistic passion that speaks of the usual human concerns of existential love. With barely a word to the audience throughout, Calvi lets her guitar and operatic tones do the talking. Again, it’s striking how inventive a player she is, having developed her own self-taught style, which is neither fussy nor fastidious. That coupled with her love of the trance-inducing properties of music has helped her produce a relatively fresh take on ‘rock’ music; she has also developed a distinct sound, a sound that while on record is more expansive and expressive (with the help of strings), is a little more, unsurprisingly, homogenised in the live arena. The acoustics of high ceiling churches don’t naturally lend themselves to amplified music or drums, but tonight the sound for the band was good, and for much of the set you could hear a pin drop, such was the respect shown for this remarkably gifted musician and performer.

All Saints Church, 11 February 2014

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