Live Appearances
Garage Upstairs, London, 1 September, 2003
Bic Runga at The Garage
Original content copyright 2003 to The Guardian
Original article is at: The Guardian
Date: 3 September 2003
By: David Peschek
Bic Runga
Garage Upstairs, London
A star in her native New Zealand before she was out of her teens, Bic Runga remains virtually unknown elsewhere. However, a recent world tour with Tim Finn (Split Enz founder and brother of Crowded House's Neil) and pub-rock mainstay Dave Dobbyn sold out a London date at the Brixton Academy on expat Kiwi word of mouth alone.
Now, five years on from her debut (released when she was only 21), Sony UK have another chance to make her mean something outside her homeland. They may think of packaging her as the new Norah Jones, and that might be the best route: half Chinese and half Maori, she is desperately beautiful and has a similarly gauzy way with a song. But she is a much more interesting songwriter than Jones, and her honeyed, sinuous voice charts wilder territory, however gently.
With just her guitar for accompaniment, these songs glimmer and twist like spider-silk drifting through golden summer air. The giddy, see-saw melody of Election Night recalls the Cocteau Twins; it is a marked improvement on the makeweight strum of Get Some Sleep, which is as drab as any song "about being on the road" would be. Bravely, she tackles Wild Is the Wind, a song best known from Nina Simone's definitive take; she offers a supremely delicate, immaculately judged reading, unafraid to let verses ebb in and out of interludes of suspenseful silence.
Dylan's One More Cup of Coffee seems similarly to belong entirely to her, an equal to her own Sway (the standout from that little-heard debut), whose heart-wrenchingly simple sentiment, "Say you'll stay, don't come and go like you," raises goosebumps. What she does, it seems, is infect apparently straightforward songs with a bewitching otherness; to borrow a Cocteau Twins phrase, it's the "sugar hiccup" in her voice.
She returns for a single encore, less a song than a wreath of smoke, called Counting the Days. It ends precipitously, vanishing suddenly, and you realise you've experienced something utterly magical.
Original content copyright 2003 to The Guardian