The first essential album of 2024 – by magical Marika
Marika Hackman Big Sigh Out Friday The Amy Winehouse Band KOKO, London Next date: April 11, St Albans
December is all about old music, whether it’s The First Noel or Last Christmas. January is when we open our ears again – and here comes the first essential album of 2024.
Marika Hackman has won friends and plaudits with her artful songwriting while never quite troubling the Top 40. That should change with her fourth album, Big Sigh, which grabs you instantly and doesn’t let go.
Born in Hampshire, the daughter of animators (one of them Finnish), Hackman is now 31. For an artist it’s a great age to be. You’re still young but you’ve worked out who you are. In Hackman’s case that means being three musicians in one. She’s a singer-songwriter strumming a guitar, a drama queen making a scene and a pianist playing pensive instrumentals. Halfway through Big Sigh is a piano piece, meditative yet immediate, just waiting to be deployed in a BBC drama. The other nine tracks are full-bodied songs, seven of them excellent. Like many a songwriter, Hackman brings you the joy and pain of being in love, but she also captures the mess. One song is called Blood, another Slime. ‘Turn to glue,’ she sings, ‘when I think about you.’ That is proper writing, simple but expressive.
Her voice can be softly confessional or suddenly commanding. If you’re on a streaming site, try the single No Caffeine, which is both catchy and crafty, converting anxiety into a satirical to-do list. Fans of Phoebe Bridgers and her supergroup boygenius will love it.
The album lasts only 35 minutes and leaves you wanting more. Happily,
Hackman is touring in March.
If Amy Winehouse was still with us, she would now be 40. In some ways she is still with us. Her masterpiece, Back To Black, has never gone away, and now her bass player, Dale Davis, has reconvened some of her gifted sidemen to form The Amy Winehouse Band for a show called Forever Amy.
Their date at KOKO, on Winehouse’s home patch in Camden Town, sold out so fast that they added another. You could see how her music had endured just by looking around.
The crowd was a cross-section, from elderly couples to a group of six girls who looked about 17.
Like Amy’s oeuvre, the show is a game of two halves. The first half is mostly songs from her debut album Frank, sharp but not outstanding. The second half gives the fans what they want: the classics from Back To Black.
The task of being Amy falls to a young singer from Bristol, Brontë Shande. It’s not quite as daunting as it seems. Once she became an icon, Amy ceased to be much of a performer. She would turn up late and look as if she wasn’t really there.
Shande, while less iconic, is much more present. She brings the right crisp timbre, bags of energy, and an endearing wingman in Ade Omotayo, Amy’s friend and backing singer. As soon as they launch into Love Is A Losing Game, the evening catches fire. To my left, the teenagers are singing every word.