THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Before the show, I mulled around the bar, observing who had come out to see Madeleine Peyroux. The audience were well heeled, Grenson shoes and Rockins silk scarves, and the median age seemed to be older than Peyroux - she is 48, but her soulful singing age is years older than her number.
Peyroux (pronounced like Peru) has quite a following - the black-turtle-necked man sitting next to me recalled listening to BBC Radio 6 Music on a Sunday and her haunting voice giving him a “stopped in my tracks” moment. She had the same affect on me at the London Palladium.
I was not over familiar with her music, but from the first note she sang, I was enraptured and realised that I had also heard her on the radio and immediately ‘Shazamed’ (the app that tells you who is singing, and what) and downloaded her onto my Spotify playlist.
It was curious why the show was at the Palladium which seats over 2,300, but it seemed full. Although the sound was excellent, I am not sure it offered enough intimacy for Madeleine and her precision-pedigreed jazz musicians. On consideration, some place like Ronnie Scott’s (where she has played in the past) would have been perfect but too small for her large audience, so perhaps it was the need for ample seating. Different to American audiences, who can chat through performances, the Palladium was dead silent with a captivated and appreciative audience. There was a melancholy to her performance and Judy Garland came to mind more than once. The performance was soothing, and gave way for inward thought, in particular the song ‘Don’t Wait Too Long’: “When your morning turns to night / Who'll be loving you by candlelight / If you think that time will change your ways / Don't wait too long."
I felt inquisitive and wanted to know more about Madeleine Peyroux and when doing an online search, you learn little, so it was a treat when she gave an interview to The American in 2021. She’s from Athens, Georgia (along with the B52’s and REM) and lived in Brooklyn but cut her teeth singing on the streets of Paris in her teens. She went to the same school with Leonard Cohen’s daughter in Paris and gives an erudite performance of his song ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’, which animated the audience. Randomly she said, “I went to British boarding school for six months,” which elicited divided mutterings, and you gather that she is a seeker and her experiences and wanderlust inform her music.
Peyroux gave a magnanimous, genuine and moving performance and her affection for singers such as Bessie Smith, Patsy Cline, Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday is apparent. She sang in Portuguese and French too. She even sang a song from Gulliver’s Travels, an American cartoon I used to love.
Her Careless Love Forever tour is in celebration of Craft Recordings deluxe reissue of her the 2004 best-selling album Careless Love.
