Madeleine Peyroux, Edinburgh review: 'embraced the personal and the political'

Madeleine Peyroux, Usher Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★

Madeleine Peyroux lost no time in endearing herself to her Edinburgh audience, opening with an unaccompanied, off-the-cuff rendition of Robert Burns’s A Man’s a Man, which slyly name-checked “yon birkies” Trump and Musk.

Following a fine support set from Louisiana singer-songwriter Joy Clark which suggested we’ll be hearing much more of her in the future, Peyroux based much of her performance on her current album, Let’s Walk, her distinctively slinky, pitch-bending vocals escorted smartly by regular collaborators, guitarist John Herington and Barak Mori on double bass and bass guitar.

The American busker-done-good manages to maintain a degree of intimacy, even in a hall like the Usher, and with an occasional line in self-deprecation: “I’m getting so tired of singing this song,” she lamented of one of her early compositions, Don’t Wait Too Long, which nevertheless swung along nicely.

Her recent compositions embrace the personal and political, such as “the empty dread” haunting the melancholy waltz time of How I Wish, or similarly dark undertones to the ostensibly light-hearted sounding Find True Love.

In contrast was the honest-to-goodness 12-bar of Showman Dan and the droll Tex-Mex ramble of Me and the Mosquito, while a round of applause greeted the opening lines of her longstanding, slickly sashaying treatment of Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love. A perhaps less expected cover was If I Only Had a Brain from The Wizard of Oz, another wry nod to current politics.

Peyroux was joined by Clark for an exuberant encore of Lee Dorsey’s Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky, but not before she’d rounded off with the purposeful, swingy stride of her album’s title track, Let’s Walk, a gospel-infused civil rights anthem that perhaps reprised the Burnsian egalitarian sentiments that opened her set.