The audience breaks off mid-murmur and eager gazes fix upon the stage where, without so much as a hello, a diminutive figure is suddenly standing. The studio cuts the lights on the crowd, prompting Cat Power’s first words, drily remarking that she would “prefer to see ‘em”, and the crowd titters bashfully. We wholly adore the singer before she’s even crooned a syllable. During the course of the show, the more daring members of the audience are heard loudly proclaiming as much, and are quite often surprised to receive a warm and casual “thank-you” for their effort. The lights, however, remain off, and the first few songs – characteristic of her soulful fusion of country and folk rock – roll across the crowd under darkness, including one of her better known tracks, Good Woman.

Cat Power, known offstage as Charlyn Marshall, surprises those who encounter her with her fresh sincerity. She is a particularly unaffected presence on the stage: her quiet and irregular comments to the crowd are usually incidental afterthoughts, sometimes ceasing halfway through a sentence, as though she is distracted by some fond memory. Hers is an astonishing voice, evocative of honey and cigarettes; listening to her against the accompanying musicians, I am wholly convinced that she could have come to the stage without them and her voice alone would have sealed the deal.

Marshall sits on 9 full albums, beginning in 1995 with Myra Lee and ending most recently with Jukebox, a set of covers of various country, folk and soul greats, in 2008. During the show she moves with ease between numbers from throughout her career. In accordance with Marshall’s attitudes to song writing, none of the pieces are verbatim executions of her records – on the contrary, each rendition forges itself almost entirely anew. Particularly pleasing to my mind is her soaring The Greatest, played very slow and ethereal.

-Jerome Walker