‘My mum’s worried that I’m going to offend people and no one will ever go to my gigs again,” chuckles Paloma Faith, explaining why her tiptoe into political music on recent No 1 album, The Architect, isn’t overly reflected in her live show. There’s no place in the setlist for Politics of Hope, the narrative by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones from the album. Nor – despite Theresa May’s grand speech on Brexit hours earlier – does the singer make any reference whatsoever to the brassily anthemic Guilty (“I’m living in my worst fears / Begging you back through tears”), apparently about a remorseful leave voter.
However, there is far more political content than we’d generally get from a mainstream pop star whose big-lunged retro soul ticks the same boxes as Adele and Amy Winehouse. Faith explains how the ostensibly breezy pop Kings and Queens was inspired by her black childhood sweetheart’s experiences of police racial stereotyping; she refreshingly employs a female rhythm section and peppers her cheery Carry On banter with fiendish little snatches of polemic (“We’re all being brainwashed to believe that we’re isolated, but we’re not”).
There’s a more direct dollop of activism when she explains why she thinks the third global war has already started, and dedicates the first line of the song WW3 (“What kind of man gets a thrill from the life he’s taken?”) to Donald Trump. “Please dance even if you don’t agree with me,” she urges, although the audience seem more enthused by guitarist Sam Lewis’s ear-splitting fret-melting than the prospect of marching on the White House.
Faith, a half-Spanish, Hackney-born child of a one-parent family, couldn’t get away with rampaging on brandishing a copy of Socialist Worker. However, it’s to her credit that she can slip slivers of protest music into what is otherwise a big, staple – if occasionally kooky – arena show, with theatrical bells and whistles. The 36-year-old trained contemporary dancer and former burlesque performer makes a grand entrance through a trapdoor beneath what looks like a giant pile of ice. She sports a magnificently ludicrous pink-sequined caped creation and drapes herself across a grand piano. While some of her more mannered speaking-singing sounds as if she’s chewing on a gobstopper and there’s an occasional hint of Butlin’s, big soul stompers such as Picking Up the Pieces and Can’t Rely on You get a seated audience on their feet. Crybaby – Lisa Stansfield-type smooth soul – and the fizzy rhythms of Changing, her 2014 hit with drum’n’bass duo Sigma, are the only significant departures from the formula, but Faith’s endearing persona stops things getting too generic.
The recent mother-of-one introduces My Body (a timely song about body image) with graphic but amusing anecdotes about giving birth by emergency C-section (“19 hours later they just cut it open!”) , while her admission that she received “hate tweets” triggers pantomime-style boos. Her wish to “spread an epidemic of kindness” – handily introducing I’ll Be Gentle (with BB Bones capably filling in for John Legend) – could easily sound trite. Still, her suggestion that individual acts of compassion can spark wider change gets a wave of applause. No one will leave here to storm parliament, but as she says, tiny ripples can eventually make a difference.
- At AECC BHGE Arena, Aberdeen, 5 March. Box office: 0844-477 9000. Then touring until 24 March.
