Anna Calvi has been compared to a young PJ Harvey, but set aside the superficial similarities and the gulf between the two couldn’t be wider. Where Harvey is all angst and catharsis (and, as of her last record, Bjork-esque head adornments) introspection and glowering inwardness are part of what makes Calvi unique. Seeing her stand to the far left of the Vicar Street stage, head bowed low, eyes glazed over, it is no surprise to learn that her debut record – self-titled and Mercury nominated – was five years in the execution or that, midway through the process, Calvi feared it might never be finished. There’s a feverish, obsessive whiff to her songs and it is easy to imagine the young Londoner driving herself to the brink of a breakdown as she wrote them.
Speaking to Hot Press early in the year, Calvi explained that she has always felt nervous, even unworthy, in the spotlight. For all her supposed jitteriness, though, at Vicar Street she casts a stark, dramatic figure. In vivid red shirt and knife-gash lipstick, her movie-star pout never wavering, she looks like a high-class rendering of one of the guitar-chugging babes from Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted To Love’ video. There’s an imperiousness to the way she holds herself that suggests someone who has known from a rather young age that they were destined to be famous.
Wrenching Ennio Morricone-esque guitar fugues from her Stratocaster, as drummer Daniel Maiden-Wood and harmonium player Mally Harpaz shuffle and shudder in the background, she opens with the driving, tortured ‘Rider To The Sea’, a gothic tapestry that proceeds from protracted guitar solo to darkly groovy dirge. From there the evening dips and weaves, the truth being that, while Calvi is a singular talent, her writing isn’t yet as irresistible as the persona she presents on stage. At moments, she lapses into introverted noodling, padding out songs that really could do with a trimming. But her best material is glorious – ‘Suzanne And I’ suggests Siouxsie and the Banshees starring in a spaghetti western, the keening ‘The Devil’ is Hammer Horror-meets-Nick Cave while a Hendrix tribute band knocks itself out in the background. It is a juddering, wailing tour de force – and a glimpse of what a special talent Calvi may become if she is granted the space and time.