emmy the great at the komedia, brighton

Having obsessed over her songs for a good year now, it was a real pleasure to finally see Emmy The Great play live in Brighton last week. In fact, having waited all this time, I saw her twice in a night as she played a short, good-spirited acoustic set at Resident Records as well as her headline show at the Komedia. At both venues she was outstanding; her delicate, beautiful songs are underscored by a dark imagination and a wonderful way with words. It makes seeing her a dual pleasure: on the surface, melodic and lovely; underneath – unsettling, moving. At Resident, deprived of a mic-stand, she asked a girl in the audience to hold her microphone for her, and stooped from the counter to provide spine-tingling takes on ‘First Love’, ‘The Hypnotist’s Son’ and ‘City Song’. For the latter, her final number, she conjured a moment of awed, shocked silence, as the closing lines rang oppressively round the shop: “they pulled a human from my waist / It had your mouth, it had your face / I would have kept it if I’d stayed”. As we walked away from the shop to grab a beer before her gig-proper, Dan posited that “she sounded like she could be Canadian”, which coming from him is the highest praise – even if she actually sounds like she comes from Primrose Hill.

At the Komedia – where myself, Dan and Sam met up with Lyndsey and a lovely friend of hers whose name I have predictably forgotten – the first act up was Younghusband, the three-piece fronted by Euan Hinshelwood, who plays guitar for Emmy. His songs are really good; hypnotic, mid-tempo indie somewhere between Teenage Fanclub and the Lemonheads, and songs about Woody Allen. Whereas on record the songs are delicately arranged, live Euan plays them in an agreeably straightforward, pure way, with little in the way of effects or complex playing. Once or twice he steps on a pedal and produces a minute or two of controlled, mannered grunge rock, but most of the subtleties derive from his winning way with a vocal melody. ‘Mass Kiss’ is a particular highlight. In a way, his refusal to crank the songs up, or cover them with ornaments, makes his songs less instantly impressive, less powerful than they might otherwise be. But the key is that the tunes stay with you, and that appears to be – and should be – quite enough.

Ex-lovers, on next, are a quite different proposition. Musically their sound is cut from a similar cloth – more hints of melodic US indie, as well as hints of C86, shoegaze and Postcard pop – but they go to lengths to create a busy, rich musical palette, most notably in their drummer’s varied, precise contribution and their lead guitarist’s ability to ring out gorgeous, descending guitar lines in the manner of a young Peter Buck. They’re at their best when they crank up the volume a bit and let go, and their worst when they’re too studious and considered. But I thought they were very promising indeed.

By the time Emmy took to the stage, myself and Lyndsey have allowed ourselves to get a bit over-excited, and an earlier conversation about how much we wanted to be friends with Emmy soon gives way to darker flights of fancy, and before long we are planning a fairly detailed sequence of events, which involve slinging Emmy into the boot of a car, and we are only brought to our senses by the fact that it suddenly becomes apparent that her family are sat right in front of us, doubtless listening in horror. Feeling a bit crazed, we accept that locking Emmy in the attic might not be the be best idea in the world, and sit in embarrassed silence waiting for her to play.

So, relieving us of our imaginations, she takes to the stage and opens with a gorgeous take on ‘We Almost Had A Baby’, which is one of her most tuneful songs and a marvellous dissection of a broken relationship, and the thought that it might have endured had a child been conceived (“and I will think of you now that we are apart / I put my hand across my gut / I plan to feed it with a heart “). So begins a sequence of songs which examine heartbreak, loss and the fall from innocence. ‘M.I.A’s depiction of a car-crash is enormously powerful, where Emmy notes that “you and me are still but the scenery moves / well why would it stop, just 'cos suddenly / there's one where there used to be two”, and the dismissal of religion in ‘Easter Parade’ is clear-sighted and pointed (“And underneath your pastures green / there's earth and there’s ash, and there’s bone / and there are things that disappear / into it and then they are gone”). The other side of her fiercely intelligent style, however, is that she’s funny, too – whether chatting easily between songs about her chances of winning the X Factor or singing, in ‘The Hypnotist’s Son’, “Every time that I think of you / I have to go to the toilet / can’t tell if this is love / or a stomach disorder.”

Musically, her band are spot-on. Other fans appear to be uneasy with the way that her songs are arranged on her album (First Love, out today), preferring her songs when her voice is accompanied only by her quiet guitar picking; but I think the full-band arrangements are both dazzlingly pretty and textbook exercises in restraint. At all times her songs remain the centrepiece, her voice clear and recognisable. My favourite song of the night is the gorgeous ‘Short Country Song’, which shows off Emmy’s talents so clearly. The song paints in delicate strokes the minutiae of a relationship, and closes with one of Emmy’s most beautiful, plaintive verses – one that isn’t, for once, clever, or complex, or wry – but simply heartfelt; the wonderful quality that Emmy, despite all this talk of lyrical skill, possesses in the greatest abundance.

And you say "Somewhere in my body
is a hole without an end"
And I say "Come and let me see it.
It is something I can mend."
And you say "Somewhere in my body
is a hole without an end"
And I say "Come and let me see it.
I can fill it up again."