The Scottish-Zambian singer ended her tour with the Stockholm show at Nalen. The beautiful venue provided a fitting setting for her soulful vocals. She would easily have been able to fill a larger hall in Stockholm, but the intimacy gave the audience an extra dimension to the live experience.
Emeli Sandé released her debut album in 2012 and you may remember her from the London Olympics where she appeared in both the opening and closing ceremony. Especially Read All About It at the closing was iconic. The album was at number one in the UK for weeks and won her many awards and critical acclaim. All the exposure was a bit too much though, so Emeli has been pretty much away from the public eye until the release of her single Hurts in mid-September this year.
Her second album Long Live the Angels is scheduled for release on November 11th and ahead of it she did a tour of eight dates at intimate venues, which brought her to Stockholm and Nalen on October 20th.
Emeli enters the stage and the lights still leave her face in the dark as she sets the mood with Intermission. She follows up with Heaven, her debut single, and two new songs from the upcoming album: Give Me Something and Every Single Little Piece. Both of the new songs are powerful and have the audience listening attentively. Next up the audience is invited to sing along to Four, Five Seconds (Rihanna, Kanye and Paul McCartney cover), which she recently also sang at BBC’s Live Lounge.
My Kind of Love from her debut album really gets the audience singing along beautifully. And Hurts, the first single from the new album, gets a powerful live rendition with Emeli getting the audience to start a furious clapping beat, in which the drums join in.
Next Emeli settles down behind the piano to do the painfully beautiful Clown. She follows up with Babe from the new album, an upbeat and confident tune with a great vibe. She ends the set with her huge hit Next to Me and once again the audience sings along, oooh oooh…
The audience makes plenty of noise to bring her back for the encore, which is quite naturally Read All About It. Everyone in the audience sings along, and it is beautiful at the end when it’s just the audience singing in harmony.
I wanna sing, I wanna shout
I wanna scream till the words dry out
So put it in all of the papers,
I’m not afraid
They can read all about it
Read all about it oh
Photos © Nina Uddin
