Vivid fans tell Laura Marling they love her stunning new show

‘IF you want an encore it was the last song. If you don’t it was the one before that,’ English singer told her adoring audience before signing off.

Laura Marling and her band appearing at Sydney Opera House for Vivid. Picture: Prudence Upton

• Jazz diva changes the energy
• Riding for the feeling
• Flying solo and loving it
• Fleet Foxes turn on the lights

YOU know how it goes. The band does the gig and waves goodnight and comes off stage.

The audience yells and screams and stamps its feet. After a minute the roadies appear in the darkness and tweak amps and instruments.

Finally the band reappears and plays anything up to another 45 minutes, depending on your luck.

It’s called the encore game.

Not so with English singer-songwriter Laura Marling. “We don’t do encores. We have a system. If you want an encore it was the last song. If you don’t it was the one before that,” she told her fans before winding up a stunning 90-minute show for Vivid at Sydney Opera House.

WISDOM

Her audience is as well-behaved and polite as Marling, an intensely private phenomenon who burst on the music scene at 18 as a fully formed composer and singer, riding the crest of the new folk revival alongside fellow Brits Mumford and Sons and Johnny Flynn.

Nine years later and with six top-notch studio albums behind her she has all the aplomb and wisdom of a veteran. With an impeccable finger-style technique on an array of acoustic guitars, and a contralto voice with a distinctive catch to it when she switches registers, she generates considerably more vocal firepower than her records might suggest.

The love of folk music and the legends from the 1960s and ‘70s like Bert Jansch and Jackson C Frank comes from her father Charles, a baronet and former sessions guitarist who owns a recording studio and who has handed down to her a few guitars over the years.

Laura Marling and her band put on a stunning show. Picture: Prudence Upton

Most of her set came from her latest album Semper Femina — her best so far — which along with the Short Movies album she made in Los Angeles a couple of years ago sees her rockier and more rounded. That’s not to say she has forgotten her roots — she did a gorgeous cover of Townes Van Zandt’s For The Sake of the Song, backed by heavenly vocals from old friends Emma and Tamsin Topolski, and in a solo bracket took a backward step to I Speak Because I Can days with What He Wrote and Goodbye England (Covered In Snow).

Marling manages to fluctuate seamlessly between sighing, half-spoken waifishness and raucous full-on rock diva

But backed by a guitarist like Simon Ribchester, who can replicate Blake Mills’s distinctive solos from the album, long-time associate drummer Matt Ingram and Nick Pini playing an array of basses, acoustic and electric, Marling manages to fluctuate seamlessly between sighing, half-spoken waifishness and raucous full-on rock diva.

And her newer songs — from the bass-driven Soothing to the wistful two-part harmony of The Valley — have lost none of their poetic power or timely relevance.

Like the sign-off to Next Time: “I can no longer close my eyes/While the world around me dies/At the hands of folks like me/It seems they fail to see there may never next time be”.

We may not have got an encore but we did get 90 minutes of sheer mesmerising brilliance from one of the leading lights of her generation.

VIVID

● CONCERT: Laura Marling

● WHERE: Sydney Opera House Concert Hall

● WHEN: Monday, June 12