Gig review: Emeli Sandé - Oran Mor, Glasgow

DESPITE her modish singles and collaborations with of-the-moment MCs, rising Scottish star Emeli Sandé is actually quite an old-fashioned songwriter.

This showcase of material from her forthcoming debut album, Our Version of Events, indicated that she favours mid-paced acoustic soul-pop arrangements, tastefully emotive piano ballads and general lyrical platitudes – which, in the age of Adele, is probably why she is chart catnip right now.

The majority of songs in the set fell squarely on the love and heartbreak spectrum including a couple of defiant survivor songs to assert her aspiring diva credentials.

As a performer, Sandé is not quite imperious enough to convince in the diva role but she did silence the chatter in the room when she moved to the piano for the bare, tremulous ballad Clown, demonstrating at a stroke why she was asked to write songs for Leona Lewis. Eventually she moved away from the middle of the road, picking up the pace with a medley of the numerous “featuring Emeli Sandé” choruses she has contributed to hit singles in the past couple of years, zipping through Tinie Tempah’s Let Go, the funky Never Be Your Woman, with its hook lifted from the old White Town hit, the sparky Diamond Rings and rounding off with Read All About It, her current No 1 with Professor Green.

She also debuted a snippet of a brand new song from her recent writing session with Alicia Keys, which turned out to be a common-or-garden “inspiration” ballad about hope, dreams, change, all that business, but was very sweetly sung.

Sandé’s soul voice is always palatable, if not particularly individual, but there were already signs of wear-and-tear whenever she resorted to belting. However, she was entirely in command when delivering her two classy singles, Daddy and Heaven.

Rating: ***