Live Review

Angus And Julia Stone – The Royal Festival Hall, London

• 16th Dec 2010

I expected the crowd of trendy thirty-somethings at the Royal Festival Hall last Thursday night, with its high checked-shirt count, and the way it hummed with a slightly Aussie twang.

I wasn’t surprised by the set either, a pocket of what the home magazines would probably term “boho-chic” amid the fifties modernist splendour of the RFH. Vintage lamps casting a lovely orange glow, Indian-patterned spreads covering the keyboards. It was all very cosy and hippie and nice (I’ll admit I was a little taken aback by the giant fake tree strung with fairy lights though.)

I expected Angus Stone to be some kind of antipodean Dylan of 2010, and he was exactly as I’d imagined him – handsomely quiet and shuffling behind a giant beard and ‘neath a floppy felt hat, crooning his lovely mellow songs with his gentle, rasping voice.

What I didn’t expect was the mesmerisingly powerful little dynamo that is Julia Stone.

I was surprised and rather blown away by this woman’s voice. Sweet and sometimes babyish in the two’s recordings, on stage it was pushed and cajoled from sexy and husky, to angsty and high-pitched, to soft and melodic.

Standing there singing so beautifully in a long white dress, her long hair dripping down over her shoulders (and next to the antipodean Dylan of 2010), it would be easy to make comparisons to women like Joan Baez. But I’m not sure Baez also played the piano, and the trumpet, or could rock the electric guitar. Or did covers of “You’re the one that I want” from Grease in a way that makes your heart break and melt at the same time.

This isn’t to say Julia stole the show, or is in any way a kind of one-woman band. Quite the contrary – the two siblings complemented each other perfectly. With the two alternating on lead, the set moved from intense to mellow, sweet to dark. Most of the songs from their recent successful album “Down the Way” were covered, with a pleasing mixture of polished musicianship and openhearted honesty.

“Santa Monica Dream” was a particularly lovely number amid the many, sung to a pin-drop-quiet audience who were hanging on their harmonies and lapping up the softly plinky acoustic guitar.

They were an absolute delight to watch, these two, inhabiting the stage with such laid-back ease and chatting away to the crowd as if we’d just popped in for a cup of tea (at one point calling their dad in Aus so we could all sing him happy birthday). Their genuine, refreshing openness combined with their simple, emotion-filled songs makes them impossible not to love.

I’m not sure evenings get much more pleasant than this. Angus and Julia, bless ‘em, gave me my last show for 2010, and it was rather easily one of the best.