Amy Speace opened her set at the Green Note in Camden, as she had thirteen months earlier at the Slaughtered Lamb, telling the audience she had just flown in and was a tad frazzled. Not that you could tell when she opened the set with ‘There Used To Be Horses’, one of her contributions to the Orphan Brigade repertoire. She followed with ‘God Came To Me’, the first of several songs from new album “The Blue Rock Session”, in which she addresses her complicated relationship with faith and spirituality.
Speace tells us how the record came about at a songwriting retreat she attended in the Texas Hill Country in late 2024. Six new songs came out of the workshopping, and at the end of it, she was invited to record them, which she did along with a number of her earlier songs, which she was able to revisit in a solo context. The next song on the set list, ‘The Sea & The Shore,’ originally on “How To Sleep In A Stormy Boat,” was one of these. Speace’s performance frames the metaphorical dialogue very neatly.
Next up – and a departure from the written set list – is ‘Dog Days’ for which she reaches back sixteen years to “The Killer In Me”. There is a swirl to the melody and the singing, which creates a slightly hypnotic feel.
‘The American Dream’, the title track to her previous record, is based around Speace’s childhood memories of growing up in the politics of the 1970s and also touches on her relationship with her father. She remarks the nostalgia was thrown into sharp focus by the 2024 presidential election taking place very soon after the record’s release. The song itself is full of warmth and sounds like it was made for radio. She follows it with ‘This February Day’, based around a walk through countryside in Tennessee. You can feel the cold wind in the performance.
The opening track on “The Blue Rock Session” is ‘On A Monday In London’, written in an anxious moment in the green room at Clerkenwell’s Slaughtered Lamb at the 2024 show. In the lyric, the venue is transplanted to a folk club in Camden, due, she explains, firstly to Clerkenwell, not rhyming, and then her being told by someone that there aren’t any folk clubs in Islington due to its being “too posh”. The audience in the folk club in Camden laughed.
Speace had a go at reimagining Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ from a female perspective. She played the song really well, to a positive response, before returning to the new album with ‘I Found A Halo’. She then switched from guitar to piano for “In New York City’ an autobiographical tale of her 20s and 30s living in the city where she first met support act Rachel Sage. The lyric has a cinematic quality, drawing word pictures in the listener’s head.
After ‘Out Of The Blue’, Speace talked us through the background of ‘Me And The Ghost Of Charlemagne’, acting as a nice intro to this gorgeous song. Returning to the guitar, she introduced ‘Weight Of The World’ as another of the Blue Rock reimagined songs. In this case, the original was a hidden track on “The Killer In Me” – out of print – and, until now, was unavailable to buy. It’s a very moving piece performed with clear emotion to a silent crowd.
The set closes with ‘Hymn For The Crossing’, a Ben Glover song from Speace’s 2015 record “That Kind Of Girl”. As the title implies, there is a strong spiritual feel to the song and a touch of the Celtic in the melody.
She’d already primed us for the encore protocol – she turns around, and if we applaud enough, she does another 180-degree spin and plays another song. All cues are followed, and after a breathy ‘Kindness’, she turns again and heads to the merch table.
Earlier on, we had a support set from New York’s Rachel Sage. Backed by The Sequins (on cajon and fiddle), Sage’s show has something of a cabaret feel to it, redolent at times of Amanda Palmer. Sage is a prolific performer and also a cancer survivor; there is a suitably defiant undertow to her singing. A funny raconteuse, she switched between piano and guitar. The fiddle player makes use of her wah-wah pedal to good effect in a couple of songs. The set is well-received by an audience that has filled up the room sooner than usual.
An evening in Amy Speace’s company is always more relaxed and fun than the threatened hour and a bit of misery she promises at the outset, and it’s a happy sold-out crowd that heads off on their Friday night journey home.
