23 July 2015 (gig)
30 July 2015
One gets the feeling that Amy Studt is at a critical point of her career. Having tasted pop stardom with Misfit and Just A Little Girl in the early noughties, the London based singer has struggled as she tried to move way from those teen years with a more grown up sound. Studt is not the only one to have found that transition hard. Her American contemporary Avril Lavigne for example. Young fans like to grow up with you, but not too quickly. And often growing up with you means growing bored of you.
Studt appears keen to, if not forget, at least move away from the recording artist of 13 years ago. It's certainly true that she caught the right moment with angst teenager girl pop in 2002, but that kind of style does not sustain a career. Since then her attempts to move on have proved harder than perhaps she expected and tonight it is clear that a line has been drawn. There is no mention of her previous songs, instead we hear new, far more raw and musically intriguing material.
In recent years Studt also released songs under a different name, and one of them - Sleepwalker - is the evening's best. It fits well with the surroundings more than anything, with a stage set that looks like it's straight out of the Twin Peaks movie. Fittingly - perhaps deliberately - Studt's ethereal music also evokes memories of Julee Cruise; both haunting and vulnerable. As does the almost too cool looking drummer and the angelic backing singers.
Introspective is often a word used to describe music that might be hard to access, and certainly it's a fitting word for the painful explorations like Different Colour Pillis and Overdose, the latter introduced by the singer saying it was for a friend who was at the same place as her at one point in her life. You presume she isn't talking geographically here.
Right now it seems, the new album - or at least performing the material live - is still a work in progress. Studt's not helped by her voice being slightly below par here. But on the evidence of the stronger material, she has an opportunity to take her career forward. For her, looking back appears no longer an option.
