Juliet Turner

For a less self-possessed performer it would have been a nightmare. Half-way through Juliet Turner’s first headline gig at The Point and Brian Kennedy, on-stage to duet with Turner on Tom Waits’s ‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You’, has fallen over a monitor onto his arse. As adept at carrying off the ridiculous as she is at generating the sublime, Turner shrugs off this moment of slapstick with the same coquettish charm that is the core of her platinum selling second album, Burn The Black Suit.

Judging by tonight’s set, which showcases new material at the start of the gig in the form of the elegiac, sweeping ‘Season Of The Hurricane’, Juliet Turner has the ballsy bearing of a true star if not the tacky celebrity status guaranteed to sell out a concert hall.

Disappearing artfully behind the various personae of her songs, the pared down acoustic honesty of ‘Pizza & Wine’ and ‘Purely Platonic’ are quiet, reflective interludes to the breezy, upbeat, organ-driven femme fatalism of ‘Take The Money And Run’, ‘Sorry To Say’ and the ever-spirited ‘Dr Fell’. Wilfully contradictory in her impulses, Turner unabashedly performs a storming version of Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring Of Fire’, a rallying cry to those she berates for pigeon-holing the female singer-songwriter as "introverted and man-hating".

Having recently signed to East-West Records, home to David Gray, and on the threshold of a UK tour with Ron Sexsmith, tonight Turner urges us to spend more time thinking about the things that move us, however sentimental. On the basis of this performance, she’ll be gone but not forgotten.