Alison Moyet, the treacle voiced chanteuse of spiky pop, returned to her electro roots at a concert featuring cuts from her new album the minutes and a peppering of hits at the Brighton Dome.
As was the case with her performance at this year’s Brighton Pride, the singer’s first full return to electronica since the 80s, was heavily laden with songs from her eighth album, her highest charting since 1987’s Raindancing.
After a missed cue and some humorous repartee (“The good thing about this happening at the beginning, is I can start again!”), the now waifish singer stormed into Horizon Flame, a luscious piece of ominous electro-pop, harking back to the muddiest of her Yazoo recordings.
Not opening with something familiar was not only commendable, but a subtle hint that Moyet is shifting away from songs or arrangements lumbered upon her during the mid-to-late 80s. A more blatant hint would be in response to one fan request for That Ole Devil Called Love; “I’m not doing that bloody song!”
The naïve Nobody’s Diary, a song written when she was just 16, bridged the gap between the old and the new, the new represented by the blazing but wounded When I Was Your Girl, the first single taken from her new album.
The re-workings of her older material started off a little awry with Ordinary Girl (quite a Morrissey sounding tune in its original form) and Is This Love? slowed down to snail’s pace. It was worrying only in that it begged the question: Does Alison, now 52, still have the capabilities to perform the machine-gun delivery of the lyrics, “Had I planned them they never would be teasing me, as viciously as these.”
Where these re-imaginings failed, the show was restored with a brilliantly biting Winter Kills, which saw Alison thaw the 30 year old song with blistering vocals, before edging the the audience into a reworking of Only You (“Think of it as camping!”), which was turned on its head with a minor key that darkened its perkiness.
Moyet’s electronic palette was further expanded with the semi-operatic dub-step clunk of Changeling, a song at odds with the sorrowful (and almost untouched) minor hit This House from 1994’s Essex album.
While many of these songs are well-suited to the dance floor, we finally ‘moved out’ of our seats for Situation, sandwiched neatly between a bluesy All Cried Out, before we went full-throttle with those sublime opening chords of Don’t Go.