And not just any solo, this was raunchy, rocky, postured and powerful. Frankly, this caught the crowd completely unawares, even though there had been a clue it was coming: the opening number Sparkle was similarly endowed with a power pop melody and a thickly textured rhythm section, more Sweet’s Suicide than Siren of Style. What to think?
The audience didn’t seem to mind: here we had a mixture of sub-teens, mainly self-conscious girls still wearing LED flashing antenna from the S Club gig a fortnight earlier (these disappeared very quickly once the grown up audience arrived and they realised how uncool this made them look); a fair contingency of clubbers, all bare mid-riffs, Hawaiian shirts and UVA tans; and then there were the elderly (that is anyone over 25), of which there were a fair number.
This might conceivably lead us to conclude that a) Sophie’s music hasn’t yet defined her audience b) Sophie hasn’t found which genre best suits her muse or c) the punters of York are so starved of live music that they all turn out en masse whenever there’s a decent turn at the Barbican. Wrong on all counts: this great variety comes from her own pen, with co-writing assistance from her manager, Andy Boyd, and, as he told me before the show, "it’s all planned." He provided the same justification for the tour. "We deliberately chose smaller, provincial cities. I didn’t want to over-expose her so early in her career, plus these are early days - despite her time working in the band Audience she needs to hone her stagecraft.
That statement should come as music to the ears of SSE and LSD, for here’s an artist with a long-term plan and the talent to match. Both companies would do well to nurture these early days. I doubt that Ms Bextor is likely to crash and burn in a two-year conflagration of intensive media and performance exposure. If you want a pigeonhole for her, think Bjork; striking physical appearance, eclectic music, innocent, almost naïve persona, but determined and well-directed. There the comparison ends.
Lighting
The Barbican has a wide stage for a relatively small venue, in spite of which, lighting designer Mark Scrimshaw has managed to make it look full with his one-third of the 45-footer parked outside. Scrimshaw’s ‘stock’ parts include a couple of rarer items from the deeper recesses of the LSD warehouse: 6ft Encapsulites and 2kW Fresnels, not exactly nouveaux art, but well applied in this instance. "I didn’t want the predictable silver truss tower with uplights so I decided on half a dozen small vertical towers so I could put the moving lights at more interesting heights around the back of the band."
So it is that Scrimshaw has black towers with the Encapsulites rigged vertically upon them: "I’ve got two types of tube, daylight and tungsten, with 180 gel on the tungstens." The latter combination on these dimmable fluorescents producing an iridescent lavender, tending toward the UV. On or off, the physical presence of the tubes distracts from the metalwork behind them and makes the towers appear slender and elegant. The 2kW Fresnels are interesting in a very singular way, merely by choosing a 147 Apricot, and having the four of them focused down from 12ft and 10ft respectively, they wrap Sophie and her band in what is simply an out-of-the-ordinary colour.
The movers are 12 MAC 500s and 12 Studio Beams from High End Systems, six of each atop the towers, another six on the back truss. There’s also a fair contingent of Pars, a dozen on the back, 30 on the front truss with five ETC Source Four profiles amongst them to warm up the band members (he must have read my Gary Moore review). With plenty of lighting types to choose from, Scrimshaw’s never short of a tool to make each song signif
