Natalie Imbruglia embraces the present day, as well as her past glories and personality traits, in a triumphant album outstore show with Crash Records at The Wardrobe.
As I get older but still like to keep my finger on the pulse in terms of checking out new bands, it’s not often these days that I go to a gig and get taken back to being a teenager, let alone one with a crush on an Australian soap star, but this show takes me right back to those days, thanks to a fun and engaging show tonight from Natalie Imbruglia.
By the time she’d departed Neighbours and moved into pop music with her debut album ‘Left of the Middle’ and its huge hit single, I was smitten with that torn-bobbed Aussie! So tonight, standing about five to ten yards from her, in a very busy venue, I’m almost blushing when part way through a song she fleetingly glances over my way, making eye contact for a split second.
There is nothing intentional about this briefest of interactions and it’s not anywhere near as pronounced as some of the moments she gives fans tonight – a direct wave here and there, brief conversations with people between songs, moments of laughter and some joking with one of her more die-hard fans. She’s thoroughly engaging throughout, lapping up the more personal atmosphere of this album launch show.
She’s clearly very proud of her first independently released album, even if it does bring more admin doing it that way; her words, not mine. She’s revelling in the reaction to the new songs, she’s cracking jokes and even asks her two acoustic guitarists Nick and Henrik “What’s going on with my banter tonight?” between songs. Within the 45 minutes she makes us laugh on numerous occasions and has herself in stitches producing more than one hearty cackle from her. It’s incredibly infectious to see a real star, relaxed and opening up to an audience like this and seemingly just being herself.
Some of that possibly comes down to her ADHD/OCD, which sees her battling a microphone wire all evening and vowing “It’s a radio mic next time, right”, she can’t help but be honest and expresses what comes into her head all night. It just makes her even more compelling and a crowd feel closer to her.
That’s never clearer than when she talks about her struggles with neurodivergence and perimenopause and tells the crowd the back story linked to those and the writing of ‘Debbie’, her favourite song on the new album, “It’s a lullaby, to remind me not to be a Debbie downer on myself”. The reaction after the song finishes is one of the best of the night.
The other tracks she plays from her new album ‘Algorithm’ are also strong in this acoustic setting. Stripped back like this the songs are laid bare and the lyrics really do come to the fore. ‘Upside Down’ has classic pop hooks and melodies, ‘Beautiful Love’ which she wrote with Guy Lightbody, has a vulnerability and a softness to it, while the closing track of the evening is a bonus track on the deluxe version of the
record called ‘Bird of Paradise’ and makes me wonder how it’s not made it on to the album proper.
Despite the joy she’s finding in the new songs, she does find time to take us on that trip down memory lane too. ‘Shiver’ and ‘Wrong Impression’ are given airings from her early noughties’ albums, and we get rousing versions of ‘Wishing I Was There’ and of course ‘Torn’, both from her debut breakthrough, which obviously the crowd lap up.
I’d usually try and find a clever or funny way to sum up a review at the end in this paragraph, but tonight I’m going to leave it to Natalie to do it for me in her own words from between songs earlier:
“I wish all gigs could be this intimate, it’s much more my vibe. I mean I want to do stadiums and make a buck but maybe I should just be a pub singer.”
On tonight’s performance, she’s too good to be a pub singer, but she’s brought the intimacy of a
pub gig to us all tonight and we leave grateful to have witnessed it, as well as feeling like we’ve met her personally and spent the evening nattering over a pint and a packet of pork scratchings in the corner with her.
Photography by Jazz Jennings.
