Michele Stodart's torch songs

© Simon Poulter 2023

I seem to have a habit of only venturing north of the Thames to hear music you can’t boogie to when it is freezing cold. I also seem to have a habit of hearing said music inside churches that are marginally less cold than on the outside, but that may be just be a reflection of the kind of music that appeals to me.  

One year ago this week I squeezed into my parka and then squeezed into a pew at the Union Chapel in Islington to see Matt Deighton and friends (and family) charm the pants off all and sundry, as he tends to do. So, almost 12 months later, on the final evening of November, I’m a couple of miles down the road in in St. Pancras, in a church, and I’m wearing the parka again. However, for some inexplicable reason, it’s a little smaller than I remember.

The place of worship in question is the delightful St. Pancras Old Church, which dates back to the fourth century, and I’m here for an equally bewitching evening with Michele Stodart. The bassist in festival favourites The Magic Numbers (along with her brother Romeo and fellow siblings and former neighbours Sean and Angela Gannon) has dialled down their indie verve on her solo outings to pursue a flavour of Americana in songs drawn from the personal and the confessional. 

The latest, Invitation, released in September (and now nominated for Album Of The Year in the UK Americana Awards), appeared in the wake of what Stodart described as “life-changing personal circumstances”, without elaborating on the specifics. That said, she has talked of the album coming from “a place of inviting in the darkness, the hard times, the sadness, anger, loss, love and grief...all of the unknown feelings that get woken up inside you.” Which, it must be said, suitably sets expectations the record duly fulfils.

There are certainly a few emotional yards being trod on this album, which at the Old Church, Stodart performs in its entirety, a seven-piece band behind her, including pedal steel guitarist Holly Carter, a violin player and a harpist. They fill out the small stage, set in front of the church’s apse, cohesively providing a bed for Stodart’s smoky voice (she sounds a lot like her brother but in a higher register) and an engaging, enchanting energy. Between songs, Stodart - one of the friendliest, huggiest performers I have ever met - speaks proudly of the women in her life: her teenage daughter Maisie, her Portuguese opera singer mother and her partner Immy, all of whom are amongst the 100 or so folk in attendance. But she is also diffident, hinting at the childhood shyness that she has spoken of (a trait seemingly at odds with being the bass player of a band that has rightly become a Glasto staple).

© Simon Poulter 2023

The inspirations for Invitation are briefly alluded to in her introductions, but there is more depth online, as she descrbed the album as reflecting years of “change, growth and transformation”. It is, she reveals, an “intimate, personal record, with songs that touch on themes of motherhood, relationships, mental health, transformation, endings and new beginnings.”  

That couldn’t be more obvious than from the opening track, Tell Me, which unrolls a conversation between lovers near the bottom of the downslope of a relationship (although not actually written directly from personal experience), one that most of us have experienced at some point in time, and usually late at night. The line “Are there any of the other sides to me that you couldn’t love?” is loaded with jaded ambiguity. 

The seven tracks that follow continue in this vein, to a greater or lesser degree, touching at both the uplifting aspects of romantic entanglement and the bleak. Stodart’s vocals breathe like Patsy Cline through the torch songs Push And Pull and Undone, while the warming, jazzy vibes of The House wrap a proverbial blanket around the ears. 

These Bones speaks of the emotional wear-and-tear of a strained relationship - “I ain’t hanging round to die,” she tells her antagonist, while The Good Fight appears to be moving things on with the opening line: “You took back the key and you closed the door,” while remaining regretful of a love that could have been. 

Drowning brings the album to an end with perhaps Stodart’s bleakest statement of the album: “I lay here surrounded by these four walls of nothingness inside of my mind, getting smaller and smaller this space I’m sinking in”. On paper, depressing (and, even, possibly a statement of depression), it comes wrapped in a shimmer of reverb reminiscent of Richard Hawley, generating something of a dream state to close the record. If all this sounds a little too melancholy to the upbeat crowd lapping it up in this elderly church, sat within the environs of Victorian railway infrastructure and concrete modernism , it’s a euphoric full stop to the first half of the evening. 

Resuming after the interval, Stodart and her band deliver a set of as-yet unreleased new songs that suggest that the pre-Covid burst of creativity that produced Invitation is continuing to bear new fruit. The new material builds out the second half until it reaches a finale to savour. This was the third time I’ve seen Stodart live as a solo artist, and on each occasion there has been a demonstrable outpouring of love and professional respect from her peers (she regularly participates in songwriting workshops and is building up a reputation as a producer). 

Some of that love is in the church, as friends present include acclaimed singer-songwriters Kathryn Williams, Hannah White and Daisy Chute, who are invited up on stage with Romeo Stodart for a seemingly unscheduled (and unrehearsed) but rousing finale of The Band’s Bob Dylan-written I Shall Be Released. It’s the song that also ends The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s film of the group’s all-star final concert. While that included special guests like Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Ringo Starr, the space in front of the Old Church’s altar is filled with no less a celebration of music by Stodart and her friends. It may not have been San Francisco’s Winterland, but its intimacy is just what Stodart’s music is made for.