Laura Marling - The Metro Theatre (August 2)

British songstress Laura Marling has two albums-worth of songs to her credit, and a huge, worldwide following.  Her performance on Monday evening, joined by Marcus Mumford of Mumford and Sons, and members of Aussie group Boy & Bear,  also featured some new songs, which she performed solo to the most attentive audience I have ever seen at the Sydney’s Metro Theatre.

The high-energy, Celtic-influenced Devil’s Spoke guaranteed our attention.  Marling followed this with more reflective songs from her album Alas I Can Not Swim which was released in 2007, when the singer was just 17.  The lyrics to a one such song, Ghosts, are remarkably world-wise and self-aware.  And the conversational, self-analytical My Manic and I is refreshing in its candour. A couple of times I had to pinch myself because I thought I was listening to Mumford and Sons, as Marcus Mumford’s style put an added shine on Marling’s lovely and quintessentially melancholic songs. 

In her solo performances, I was struck by Laura Marling’s radiant vulnerability.  She seemed to address the audience as a shy girl might speak to a close friend.  Songs such as Alas I Can Not Swim and My Manic and I, which I knew from their folksy animated video clips, took on new meaning when sung by this frail, live woman at the centre of a whirlwind of words.

Laura Marling unveiled her newest song Rest in the Bed, which  deals with the questions at the heart of every relationship.  A line from another of her new tunes Don’t Ask Me Why - “it might not be right but it’s real” - stayed in my head long after the show had ended.
 
I was thankful that the evening in Sydney was at least a bit dank, when Laura Marling sang her Christmas classic Goodbye England (Covered in Snow), a beautiful, bittersweet love song to winter that left me with equal parts regret and longing, as I believe all good love songs should.

Marling closed with the title songs from her two albums, Alas I Cannot Swim, a deceptively simple folk song in the tradition of social commentary, which should remain a classic in decades to come, and the enigmatic ballad I Speak Because I Can.  It was a perfect night with no loose ends, just the way Laura Marling wanted.