Emeli Sandé, Roundhouse, review: A stirring performance of raw emotion

There is a sense of new beginnings at Emeli Sandé’s intimate solo show for the venue’s In the Round Festival. Against minimal backdrop, the Scottish soprano is alone at the piano, bathed in a golden glow as she delivers her new single “Brighter Days”, an ode to renewal in the face of trying times.

Ostensibly about collective action, it works as an allegory for the latest phase of Sandé’s career.

It’s now 10 years since her debut album Our Version of Events made her a household name, breaking records set by The Beatles and making her an omnipresent figure in pop culture – performing at the White House, singing at the 2012 Olympics, working with Rihanna and Alicia Keys. But her fortunes have fluctuated in the past decade (her last album, 2019’s Real Life, was a commercial disappointment).

If there is a charge that Sandé’s oeuvre, mined from the gospel soul tradition, is often too safe – and her dazzling voice, easing from powerful tremor to falsetto, is needed to carry the less arresting moments – then that is repelled, tonight at least, by hearing songs in their embryonic form.

Befitting the intimacy, this is a stirring performance of raw emotion, Sande’s songs taking on renewed vigour stripped of their pop bombast.Some even reveal new meanings: on last year’s Jaykae duet “Look What You’ve Done”, a lovestruck tale on record, Sande sounds more accusatory than besotted.

Elegantly attired in flowing white and glittery dress (“a posh dress for a posh night”), Sandé is a warm host and easy-going raconteur. It makes the moments she summons anger a powerful jolt against type.

The middle eight of “Hurts” is transformed into something rather menacing; better still is the excellent new song “Another One”, a response to the Black Lives Matter movement. The pain and frustration of injustice is palpable, captured in a memorable refrain imploring everyone to remember that “we are human beings”.

Breakthrough songs “Next To Me” and “Read All About It” are lapped up, and as the evening progresses you notice more and more how the threads throughout Sandé’s work – love, friendship, empowerment – chime with 2022’s pop landscape. For Sande, then, those brighter days might be here again.