Review: Beth Orton, Pocklington Arts Centre, July 20

DOES Beth Orton enjoy playing concerts? Well, she must, because why else would she head to Pocklington Arts Centre the night before her festival slot at Kaleidoscope in London, but this was nevertheless an erratic gig.

Beth must be thanked for going ahead with a Pock show when other acts lined up for the 2018 Platform Festival had fallen away like so many potential Leeds United summer signings, leading arts centre director Janet Farmer and venue manager James Duffy to strike it from the 2018 diary, but with plans to return.

Orton, Brit Award winner and consistently individual female voice, is 47 now, highly experienced at studio craft, still in love with songwriting and experimenting, but it was hard to tell exactly why she was doing this show, betwixt albums, two years on from Kidsticks, with new material in the studio melting pot.

Would we hear a new song in Pocklington, Beth, The Press had asked in her interview. "Might do," she said. Might not, we assume, although she started with three less impactful Orton works, working her way into her stage partnership with guitarist and loop effects specialist Grey McMurray, who, like his first name, is not one for the limelight.

Beth wants her songs to be both intimate and expansive in Grey's company; the expansive did not always suit, however, the McMurray guitar sometimes too harshly heavy, the atmosphere no match for her folktronica past.

Beth's phrasing wavered too; her storytelling between songs did not always come to a point. Oh, for more songs to have had the direct heart and soul and unaffected delivery of encore Concrete Sky.

Charles Hutchinson