Music

Suzanne Vega

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Rob Adams

four stars

SUZANNE Vega faces a dilemma on her latest tour. Does she put the songs from her latest album, Lover, Beloved, after which the tour is named, at the beginning of the set or should she work towards them with more familiar material?

With the quietly persuasive personality she exudes, it probably doesn’t matter, although the softening up approach she used here, with just sometime David Bowie guitarist Gerry Leonard for company to begin with, worked splendidly. Leonard can give off the energy of a whole band or the eerie ambience of a haunted cave, and Vega tuned into both with stagecraft that’s cool and self-possessed and a voice that conveys characterisation and narrative with beautiful assurance.

She has an actor’s presence, almost literally growing into Marlene on the Wall’s Dietrich role by the simple expedient of bashing a top hat to its full height and popping it on her head, and she gives just enough away in her introductions to make songs such as the one she wrote to celebrate a summer love at eighteen something you want to hear.

Lover, Beloved is inspired by writer Carson McCullers and with Jason Hart, on keyboards, joining Vega and Leonard, the songs from it were entrancing. The album has the kind of of-the-times atmosphere and smart lyricism that makes for compelling listening and Vega captures McCullers’ wit, poetic sensibility and bitchiness brilliantly.

With an unlit cigarette as a prop, she made McCullers flesh, especially in the marvellously disdaining, opposition-obliterating Harper Lee, and as a parting shot, Carson’s Last Supper was a glorious carousal in the Kurt Weill-Jacques Brel tradition, but with added charm.