Jessie Ware – Brixton Academy, London 29/01/15

02 February 2015, 15:29 | Written by Thomas Hannan

(Live)

(Jessie Ware)

My first experience of Jessie Ware live was so brief and from such a distance it doesn’t even count, but so impressive that I’d spent the time since very excited at the prospect of what a whole show could entail. A few years back, ambling around Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival when I should have been legging it over to catch Ware in her full glory, I found myself in one of the site’s weird sweet spots where – despite not being anywhere near the stage, nor even facing it – the sound existed in a perfect bubble. The song I was hearing was “Running”, which was sadly also the last of the set. It throbbed and oozed with a perfect elegance, and made me think I’d dismissed Ware, who I’d previously thought of as being Sade 2.0, far too hastily, like a big indie purist idiot.

Tonight, I’m in luck. She opens with “Running”, and it’s just as miraculous as I remember from that enticing little snippet years ago, given a power and pulse that none of her recorded material has yet to quite nail. She’s got me in her pocket with little to no effort, but for most people here, that state had been achieved before she’d even stepped foot on stage.

This, you see, is a homecoming show, and when Ware addresses the crowd like old friends (“ohh, you know me!”), one suspects she doesn’t just mean her mum, dad and brother sat in the front row of Brixton Academy’s packed upper tier. Before dedicating “You And I” to her husband, she tells us she’s more nervous about tonight that she was about her wedding day. Of course, such nerves are totally unnecessary – the first of two sold out nights at the venue where she tells us she used to watch Basement Jaxx and Ash back in her youth is full of people willing on her every move.

Between songs, what we get from Ware is mostly effing, jeffing and, at the end of “If You’re Never Gonna Move”, some embarrassed crying (“Oh bloody hell!”, she sobs). But mid song, she’s effortlessly graceful. Her band, all dark suits and stylish sneakers, look every bit a modern day Blondie but never once encroach upon Ware’s limelight. If there’s one criticism to be made, it’s that their renditions of some of the mid temp songs from recent LP Tough Love - of which there are many - are so slick they could be made to sound decent by pretty much any competent singer, whereas the earlier Devotion material retains a feeling about it that has one thinking Ware and only Ware could do it justice (“Kind Of, Sometimes, Maybe” especially loses some of its sensual charge when its sonics are blown out this far). Yet picking fault doesn’t really feel in keeping with the ambiance of evening.

Ware says she’ll count the night as a success if there’s unofficial merch being sold outside the venue after the gig. And lo and behold, upon exit we find the pavements littered in hastily printed t-shirts bearing her image. In truth however, she’d succeeded long before.