'Psychedelic folk that twists and leaps': Beth Gibbons, at the Barbican, reviewed

A decade ago, a group of people who owned small music venues came to the conclusion that the kinds of places they ran were teetering on the brink of a catastrophic extinction event. And so they formed the Music Venue Trust, which has spent ten years kicking cans and shouting the odds about the need to preserve these places, about how they are the production lines from which the festival headliners of tomorrow come.

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Quite right. Good, small venues are the best place to enjoy both live, loud, raucous music and intimate performances where the crowd’s hush is as deafening as any amp. They offer space for experimental work; for seasons of related artists; for shows that wouldn’t work in a conventional standing venue. Those shows needn’t just be the concert hall staple of rock programming where acts you’ve just about heard of play the B-sides of someone who died 30 years ago.

The Barbican last week offered two shows that simply wouldn’t have worked a couple of miles away at the Forum. Beth Gibbons’s performance, for example, demanded complete and rapt attention. She has recorded just five studio albums in 20 years – three with Portishead, one with Rustin Man, and now this year’s brilliant solo album Lives Outgrown – and she rarely plays live.

She was certainly not a huge, charismatic presence: she clasped her mic stand with both hands, leaning into it as if clinging to a tree in a storm, and when she wasn’t singing she turned away from the audience. The stage was backlit, so she was simply a dark silhouette, an all-but-disembodied voice.