On the first of two sold-out shows at the Roundhouse, folk singer-songwriter Laura Marling was the epitome of less is more in an enchanting solo performance.

The Brit Award winner’s seventh studio album Song For Our Daughter was nominated for a Mercury prize and a Grammy Award in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Tonight the clamshell bulbs dotted across the stage accompanying a lone caged lightbulb and a small table were clues as to what the evening would hold. As intimate as a room with over a thousand people could get, the only thing missing from the setting was Laura Marling herself, and that’s exactly what we got.

A medley of Take The Night Off, I Was An Eagle, You Know, and Breathe made for a lengthy yet perfectly woven together intro. Songs from her extensive repertoire such as What He Wrote, How Can I, and Wild Fire made appearances alongside The End Of The Affair off the new album, for which Marling describes how the random selection of the name Max for songwriting’s sake prompted both the Max’s in her life (one of whom is her therapist) to reach out to her questioningly.

A brief medical emergency interrupted Sophia, and the chatter that filled the room in the meantime died down just as quickly as it started when Marling returned to the stage and restarted the song, determined to give us the full experience despite the delay. The highlight, of course, had to be the unreleased and unnamed track aimed at the government’s lockdown advert suggesting that a ballerina, or more widely people in the arts, could retrain in cyber security. Describing it as “hideous” and “unbelievably misjudged”, Marling went on belting out the lines “You don’t hate Mondays, you hate getting fucked in the tits, I was an artist before I was this” and “Can you believe I used to suck dick for free?”, garnering huge cheers from the audience.

Ending with her best songs, title track Song For Our Daughter led into a chirpy For You, ending the somewhat sombre night on a different note.

Photos: Abigail Shii