Buckley showcase is a demanding indulgence

This year’s “pop prom” was a missed opportunity. It aimed to showcase the sounds of New York. With its energetic melting pot of genres and cultures it is the city that is too damn noisy to sleep. But I could have easily dozed through much of this investigation of some curious corners of its soundscape.

Jeff Buckley and his Heritage Orchestra have become regulars at the Proms. But after previous events featuring the work of David Bowie, Scott Walker and Quincy Jones, this year’s collaborators all hailed from the other end of the hit parade. We were treated to an experimental digital soul singer (serpentwithfeet), a Puerto Rican rapper (Nitty Scott), a complex singer-songwriter (Sharon Van Etten) and an electro disco outfit (Andy Butler aka Hercules & The Love Affair).

Presumably Buckley would argue this was a bill pushing the evolution of the city’s sound. But some marginal artists performing radically reshaped versions of their own obscure material was a demanding indulgence.

Serpentwithfeet was entrancing. Nitty Scott brought some welcome energy to her zesty but unremarkable rapping. Van Etten is a world-class songwriter, although her voice has a mixture of roughness and fragility perhaps better suited to her usual guitar-based arrangements. Hercules & The Love Affair raised the tempo but they probably hoped to inspire more than a lacklustre side-to-side shuffle from Promenaders.

At the end, Van Etten delivered a stirring encore of New York, I Love You But You’re Getting Me Down by LCD Soundsystem. This, I suspect, is what much of the audience came for: an adventurous reimagining of a quintessentially New York anthem. Sadly by then many were already flooding out into the London night.

Forget the city that never sleeps, this was a concert that never woke up.