Dredging beauty from a state of acute anxiety

Keaton Henson London Palladium

Keaton Henson is like a supermoon: his appearances are rare, and only the dedicated, and the lucky, are able to witness them. When it was announced he would play his biggest shows to date, the 2,300 tickets for his London Palladium event sold out in minutes.

The 28-year-old singersongwriter’s solitary nature imbues more than just his eviscerating, strippedback songs. He admits that “chronic anxiety” prevents him from leaving the house for several weeks. As with the late Leonard Cohen, whose song closed the setlist, he mines the depths of the human condition to express what many feel but struggle to articulate – even if he compares sharing it with a live audience to being like a shark attack. Watching someone who is so visibly uncomfortable perform is an uneasy experience. Lanky and clad in black, Henson spent part of the gig sitting at a baby grand with his back to the audience. He was backed by a string quartet and Ren Ford, a cellist whom Henson described as “a light in [the] storm” of live performance. These musicians bolstered his tremulous vocals, and the show peaked when they and Henson, on piano, played his swooning instrumental numbers.

Henson’s is a voice that triumphs not in its musicality, but in its power to evoke. one of the album’s-worth of songs that Henson wrote about the day his first love imploded, was performed with the same raw pain that inspired its conception nearly a decade ago.

His rapt audience were so quiet that a collective sigh could be heard when favourites such as

were begun. Make no mistake, this show was for the fans’ benefit, not Henson’s. “I’m glad I got through it,” he told them near its close, “because there won’t be something like this for a while.” The standing ovation was uproarious.