Madeleine Peyroux, Barbican review - a transport of delight

You can take the woman out of the Left Bank, but you can’t take the Left Bank out of the woman. Madeleine Peyroux would be perfectly at home in a boîte in the Latin Quarter, or perhaps Montparnasse. Alas, we were in the sadly unromantic surrounds of London’s Barbican, where the lighting crew had done a good job of creating a smoky vibe before curtain-up.

If the smell of Gauloises and Lillet were of necessity left to the imagination, Peyroux and her four-piece band provided a 90-minute transport of delight to the near-capacity audience that was, surprisingly, notably older than the singer herself. A jazz audience perhaps, not one for a singer-songwriter per se.

It was a rather beguiling concert, Peyroux with her trusty old Martin guitar, which seemed somewhat reluctant to stay in tune, and a wonderful band – longtime guitarist Jon Herington with whom she co-wrote her latest album, Let’s Walk, plus Paul Frazier on bass, Graham Hawthorne on drums and percussion, and Andy Ezrin on piano and keyboards. Let’s Walk, her first album in six years, featured prominently, but Peyroux dipped in to her capacious song bag and brought out a series of polished gems. She opened with “Don’t Wait Too Long” from Careless Love, her second solo outing and which provided a backbone to the evening – Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to The End of Love” was a particular standout, and she gave a very different slant to Bob Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When you Go” from Bob Dylan’s Blood On the Tracks, a masterpiece released when Peyroux was still in diapers.

It was an easy, intimate show, Peyroux occasionally bantering with the appreciative audience as she introduced the songs, offering fragments of the history and the artists behind them. She talked about “J’ai deux amours”, Josephine Baker’s 1930s number about having two loves – Paris and America, her birth country from which she was driven by racism. Her two-timing didn’t endear her to her compatriots, but she used her position to spy for the Allies. Peyroux’s telling of the story elicited a loud cheer.

She talked too of “Showman Dan” as she immortalises Daniel William Fitzgerald, who led the Lost Wandering Blues and Jazz Band, which played everywhere and anywhere and whose determined, unfettered music-making was a great inspiration to Peyroux, who met him in Paris where the band became her second family. “Take Care” is a humorous half-spoken tribute to her real-life hippie mother, while “Me and the Mosquito” and “Nothing Personal” demonstrate the polarities of her songwriting talent – the frivolous and the deadly serious.  As for the title track, “Let’s Walk”, with its gospel-inflected style and call-and-response, Peyroux wrote it as she marched in summer 2020 for #BlackLivesMatter, a white woman locking arms with her black brothers and sisters in the search for truth, justice and love.

Peyroux offered a well-paced set that reflected the variety of her music-making as she slipped easily from one style to another, the band up to every musical challenge.

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