It takes real command to hold London’s attention against the competition of an international football semi-final. Celeste Waite, billed opposite England v Denmark for only her second gig in 18 months, has the nerve to attempt it, the voice to do it, and the dress to match.
At the centre of the Union Chapel’s small stage, ringed with art deco-style lights (Celeste’s own), she stands like some jazz-age snake goddess, sculptural loops of black coiling round her wrists and calves. She opens with a calm declaration of resolve. Ideal Woman, with its sinuous melodies and languid froideur, lists all the reasons why Waite will be no one’s paragon, and warns drily: “Please don’t mistake me for somebody who cares.” Her stage presence is contained, still; all the energy goes into the voice, and the spell never breaks, even in extra time.
Celeste has been waiting a long time for tonight. In 2020, having bagged the top spot in the BBC’s Sound Of list in January and the Brits Rising Star award in February, she was booked to record her debut album in March, followed by a headline tour. And then… well, you know what happened in March 2020.
To hear Celeste tell it, though, the pandemic, far from draining her momentum, actually let her dodge a trap; with her debut’s release delayed, she had more time to assert herself, and, despite initial uncertainty behind the scenes about the jazziness, slowness and subduedness of Not Your Muse, it went straight in at No 1 in February this year.
That’s not to say there were no compromises. The album was largely co-written with Jamie Hartman, the man behind Rag’n’Bone Man’s megahit Human, and its most ubiquitous track, Stop This Flame, sounds exactly like a song written after someone in management says “I don’t hear a single”. It isn’t, she has refreshingly confessed, Celeste’s favourite, and tonight she takes the single firmly her own way, beginning it in a slow, dark and sweaty incarnation with psychedelically rolling drums and an intent, bluesy swagger, the band only accelerating into the familiar racing Sinnerman piano vamp when they’re good and ready. It sparks ecstatic chair-dancing, clapping and whooping; the couple next to me leave when it’s finished.
To Celeste, Stop This Flame and the similarly amped, post-Winehouse retro-belter Tonight Tonight are the tentpole releases that allow her to indulge in her preferred mode of luxuriously slow, meticulously intense emotional debrief, as on Strange, which, in the clarity of a single spotlight, reflects with resigned curiosity on how two lovers can become awkward strangers in the space of a breath.
The most gripping moment, though, is Father’s Son, from the 2019 Lately EP. Emerging gradually from a fluttering, free-roaming sax solo, it sounds thrillerishly dark and heavy, with sharp cracks of snare. The song contemplates Celeste’s unknowable emotional inheritance from her father, who died when she was 16. “I heard it’s in your blood, baby,” she sings, “I heard you got the same taste in your mouth.” She pushes her voice up to the vaulted roof until you can hear the bite.
If there’s a certain safety in the studiedly vintage vibe of some tracks from Not Your Muse (Hartman has also written for Paloma Faith), it’s a safe bet that, with the achievement and authority of a No 1 album under her belt, Celeste will push out further. Listening to the darker, weirder takes on modern soul on her early, self-released tracks or those she made with SBTRKT collaborator Tev’n, Billie Eilish’s brother Finneas or Leeds’s gritty soul production collective Gotts Street Park, you can easily imagine her travelling a similar path to that of Lianne La Havas, Corinne Bailey Rae or Solange, moving from the platform of the mainstream to the core of what she wants to be.
For now, finally on the road, Celeste has earned a bit of laurel-resting: “The album is me taking a firm stance and saying: ‘This is who I am,’” she told NME. Tonight, she closes with the song of the same name, those five words her last of the evening.
