Range and power – and amazingly she sang all her songs: Christina Aguilera at Wembley reviewed

In every respect bar its austere pews, the Union Chapel is one of the best venues in London: beautiful and atmospheric, it encourages concert-goers to listen rather than chat. There’s no bringing in booze from the bar, so you’re not disturbed by people going hither and thither (though the couple next to me had smuggled in a thermos of tea and a pack of Choco Leibniz).

It suited the Delines, from Oregon, down to the ground. Though they released their first album only five years ago, the Delines are hardly a young band. They’re middle-aged and their songs are middle-aged: sad and weary laments for lives that have slipped out of focus. Their songwriter (and guitarist) Willy Vlautin is also
a decent novelist, and he brings a novelist’s precision to his writing, using plain language to tell devastating short stories, like that of the woman in ‘The Oil Rigs at Night’, who is going to leave her marriage while her husband’s out on the rigs, or the wife in the opposite situation in ‘He Don’t Burn For Me’, wondering why she is no longer desirable: ‘He used to call me at work/ Just to say “Hi”/ He would tell me he couldn’t sleep/ Unless he was by my side.’ The writing looks plain on the page, but when delivered by Amy Boone, who has a voice so soft and controlled it could be used to quell riots, these songs went somewhere beyond heartbreaking.

Behind Boone, the rest of the band — lit in reds and blues so muted you could sometimes scarcely see them — played their stately country-soul without flash, colouring between Boone’s verses with the saddest of all the instruments: pedal steel, Fender Rhodes and muted trumpet.