Blessed with a voice you might imagine perfectly suited to interpreting others’ material, Anohni has largely shied away from recording covers. A couple of songs by Dylan, Lennon and Yoko Ono, an amazing take on Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love – and that’s been about it over her 24-year career. But Lou Reed clearly occupies a special place in her heart: “He always had my back,” she tells the audience at this show devoted to his repertoire, going on to detail how Reed relentlessly lobbied record companies to release her work.
Indeed, the first time mainstream British audiences were exposed to her was on Reed’s 2003 album The Raven and the subsequent tour, where Anohni sang a haunting version of Candy Says. That said, striking as her performances were, they were easy to overlook, The Raven being an album that also featured Steve Buscemi and Willem Dafoe attempting to deafen each other by bellowing bad dialogue at the tops of their voices and David Bowie singing about being a frog, while the subsequent live shows also involved Reed appending a lengthy scat vocal solo to Sunday Morning, performing a funk version of All Tomorrow’s Parties and inviting a tai chi master onstage to do the splits while he sang Perfect Day: in both cases, there really was an awful lot to take in.
Tonight’s show takes a noticeably more straightforward attitude to Reed’s back catalogue. The arrangements are largely faithful to the recorded versions; initially at least, Anohni herself seems a little tentative in essaying Jesus and Coney Island Baby. But her vocals take off during the lesser-known You Wear It So Well: they spill out of the song itself, not for the last time resuming a cappella, and occasionally without amplification, after the band stop playing. By the time the set reaches Perfect Day, she’s evidently in her element, taking risks with the song’s melody and phrasing that justify the gig’s appearance as part of the London jazz festival: you’re very aware of an artist pushing at the boundaries and structure of a song on the spot.
It’s a beautifully curated set that shifts easily between the songs you might expect, Femme Fatale and Pale Blue Eyes among them, and deep cuts: her voice is an oddly but appealingly serene presence during a tumultuous version of Shooting Star, from 1978’s Street Hassle. There seems to be a particular focus on Reed’s most nakedly personal songs – Kill Your Sons, Families – which fits with Anohni’s between-song recollections: the Lou Reed she knew was clearly some distance from the disagreeable caricature that usually turned up to interviews. And sometimes, her reinterpretations seem faintly miraculous. She turns Follow the Leader – one of a number of will-this-do? tracks from 1976’s Rock and Roll Heart that gave the distinct impression Reed had given up even pretending to try – into a potent hymn to Manhattan, extemporising new lyrics about Aids and 9/11 alongside the assurance that the city still contains “all the dreams I care about”. In a lovely bit of programming, she follows it with a delicate reading of Chelsea Girls, one of the songs Reed gifted to Nico for her debut solo album, its litany of Warhol superstars acting as a kind of siren song for the city, an alternately alluring and forbidding fantasy of arty New York.
She ends with Sliver of Ice, the song she wrote about Reed after his death. Anohni once encouraged him to do an intimate showcase of his songwriting like this, offering her band the Johnsons as backing musicians, she says, an idea Reed rejected with a flat “nah”. As for this show’s future, she seems uncertain: she describes it as a “maiden voyage”, but notes that it may well be a one-off. That would be a pity. Anohni is every bit as gifted an interpreter as you might imagine, and in Reed’s oeuvre, she’s found a perfect vehicle.
