Sometimes it takes a while to get to where you need to be. Los Angeles-based singer Marley Munroe has been around the block, having spent the early years of her career dabbling in alt-rock, R&B, Christian music, hotel covers bands and session singing. None of it got her very far.
She found her mojo in 2020 when a simultaneously stark yet sultry cover of Nina Simone’ 1963 civil rights lament Blackbird, released in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, swivelled heads her way. She changed her stage name to Lady Blackbird and, since then, has become a skilled purveyor of nuanced, visceral jazz-soul.
She also has an impressive line in Grace Jones-style spectacular stage costumes, and totters on stage tonight in soon-discarded stilettos, a white boned corset and a hat with ankle-length veil that could grace a particularly feverish Fellini film. It’s like being entertained by a burlesque bride, or a goth beekeeper.
Behind the outfit, the personality-plus Blackbird is an engaging performer. Backed by a low-key four-piece jazzy band, with her producer and co-writer Chris Seefried on guitar, she fully inhabits No One Can Love Me (Like You Do), a magnificent Motown-style ballad from her brilliant second album, Slang Spirituals.
Her youthful musical touchstones were Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and it shows. She has the lung power to morph Matter of Time, a hymn to a love about to begin, into a classic soul belter. She clambers on to a high stool – no easy task for a goth beekeeper – to lay claim to her own queerness in Someday We’ll Be Free.
“I have a lot of anxiety, so I don’t like to talk a lot,” she divulges confusingly during one of her many long and rambling between-song monologues. After vanishing from stage and re-appearing in the Palladium’s stalls, she throws herself into the lithe, funky gospel of Like a Woman, then breathes aching melancholy into the folk enigma Tim Hardin’s It’ll Never Happen Again.
For all of her front and volume, she is a sensitive musical interpreter, encoring by turning the Broadway standard and Gloria Gaynor hit I Am What I Am from a camp celebration into a brooding torch lament. Lady Blackbird has been on a long musical odyssey, but she made it home.
• Lady Blackbird plays Bristol Beacon, 31 January; Pavilion theatre, Glasgow, 3 February; Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, 4 February
